Companies can use Gen AI to drive Top/Bottom Line Growth, with Intelligent Automation
As Predictive & Generative A.I become increasingly important to organizations, Technology Leaders are focusing on determining where to focus to drive business impact and deliver tangible ROI.
We’re all familiar with the concept of leveraging Automation to create efficiencies with simple repetitive tasks. Thanks in large part to classic rule-based automation such as RPA tools. This is done by hard-coding specific rules in a computer program. I believe the advent of Intelligent Automation will be a key driver for helping organizations drive top & bottom-line gains with Generative A.I
Intelligent automation (IA), also called Intelligent Process Automation (IPA), is the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) to automate tasks and processes in an intelligent way. AI enables intelligent automation systems to learn from data and experience, make decisions, and adapt to changes in the environment. RPA enables intelligent automation systems to perform repetitive tasks and automate workflows.
Intelligent Automation helps to automate more than just repetitive tasks though. It’s about combining robotic process automation (RPA) with process mining, Object Character Recognition (OCR), Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) - to create business process automation with cognitive ability.
Intelligent automation is already being applied to several customer-facing operations, notably customer service, contact center and call center operations. IA is also being utilized in internal operations, such as purchase order administration. In Platform Ecosystems, IA & machine learning is being used to analyze historical and real-time workload and compute data. An intelligent automation platform could then manage workloads to optimize runtimes and prevent delays, while provisioning and deprovisioning virtual machines to meet real-time demand.
In doing some research, I came across a handful of well-known examples of how businesses are using Intelligent Automation, today.
• Eliminating mundane (repetitive) administrative tasks – notably Data entry, Event registrations, Invoice reminders, Payroll, Extracting data from online forms
• Data analysis and predictions: Companies across different industries are increasingly dealing with loads of structured & unstructured data. Intelligent automation can be used to automate a wide range of tasks, including Data entry, Order processing, Risk management and Supply chain management. Businesses will also increasingly use Intelligent Automation to strengthen Predictive Analysis scenarios – notably Inventory & Sales forecasting.
• Boosting the customer experience: IA will significantly improve how companies deliver customer service to end customers. Everything from speed and efficiency to reinventing digital front doors with chatbots, virtual assistants and voice activated solutions. Also excited to see what cross sell / upsell opportunities will be enabled through the use of Intelligent Automation.
• Automate the creation of data: Generative AI can be used to create synthetic data, which can be used to train and test IA systems. This can help to improve the performance and accuracy of IA systems, especially in cases where real-world data is limited or unavailable.
• Automate the generation of knowledge: Generative AI can be used to generate new knowledge, such as insights, trends, and predictions. This knowledge can be used to improve the decision-making capabilities of IA systems.
• Automate the creation of new content and experiences: Generative AI can be used to create new content and experiences, such as text, images, code, and music. This can be used to automate tasks such as marketing, creative design, and customer service.
How are you using automation today, across your organizations? Here are some ideas to consider as you determine where to focus intelligent automation efforts to drive business impact and deliver tangible ROI:
• Identify your most important business goals. What jobs are you hiring Intelligent Automation to do, for your organization? What are the most important things that you need to achieve in order to succeed? Once you know your business goals, you can start to identify the specific tasks and processes that can be automated to help you achieve those goals.
• Prioritize automation opportunities. Not all automation opportunities are created equal. Some opportunities will have a greater impact on your business than others. Prioritize your automation opportunities based on the potential impact to your business goals and the complexity of the automation project.
• Start with a pilot project. Don't try to automate too much too soon. Start with a pilot project to test the waters and learn from your experience. Once you have successfully implemented a pilot project, you can start to scale up your automation efforts.
• Measure your results. It is important to measure the results of your automation efforts to ensure that you are achieving the desired outcomes. Track metrics such as efficiency, productivity, costs, and customer satisfaction to see how your automation efforts are impacting your business.
IA already helps eliminate the need to do mundane administrative tasks and free up time for employees to get more done. Smart use of Intelligent Automation will also make business functions more efficient and cost effective.
In a future write up, I’ll focus on evolving Industry Specific Scenarios where Intelligent Automation is delivering value and a few companies actively benefiting from IA, today.
