For years, many companies have hoped to gain more benefits from technologies such as robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence, but they have felt confused and bewildered in their application, and some have even felt afraid and uneasy about adopting new technologies.
But times have changed. Today, automation technology has become a rapidly developing field, attracting companies to drive technology to help and change people's work and lives. According to market research firm StaTIsta, the global automation market revenue was approximately $214 billion in 2021, compared to $186 billion in 2019.
There are several reasons why businesses are so keen to adopt automation. Some are drawn to automating simple, repetitive processes, improving efficiency, and saving business costs; others are more ambitious. For example, some industrial giants are beginning to use artificial intelligence to manage their sensors and applications, rapidly analyzing the vast amounts of data generated to create actionable insights. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated these trends, prompting businesses to embrace and implement digital transformation at an unprecedented pace. In fact, according to Flexera's 2021 State of Technology Spending Report, nearly half of companies globally plan to increase IT spending this year, and almost two-thirds say they will invest more in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Save time and cost
The simplest and most rewarding benefit of adopting automation is that businesses can save time and effort. Automation can be used to perform rule-based repetitive tasks, such as administration or data cleansing. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is perhaps the most successful of these technologies, often freeing up employees to focus on tasks that machines cannot perform. A 2019 Deloitte survey of 523 companies worldwide found that some executives expect automation to increase employee capabilities by 27% by 2022, equivalent to adding 2.4 million employees. By saving employees more time, this ultimately enables business leaders to maximize their workforce's potential.
Furthermore, this capability can be integrated into business models to support employee work. For technology-based tasks with high automation requirements, such as managing IT infrastructure, it allows employees greater control and understanding of the framework they are managing, as it streamlines internal operations. While some processes still require manual intervention, automating system maintenance and configuration can significantly enhance employees' ability to manage networks. Many enterprises are going a step further, moving towards effectively independent and self-healing infrastructure—monitoring, managing, and resolving infrastructure issues with minimal human intervention.
Improve data insights to make smarter decisions.
The data-driven competition in business is underway. For many enterprises, data is one of their most valuable assets. From customer-facing front-end operations to back-end network management, data provides a wealth of insights to maintain business agility and deliver the intelligent and personalized experiences users expect.
According to estimates from research firm IDC, more than 59 ZB of data were created, captured, copied, and consumed globally in 2020, compared to 33 ZB in 2018. This indicates that enterprises face significant challenges in efficient analysis and protection, network management has become more difficult, and IT professionals are dealing with a large volume of status updates, alerts, and threat information every day.
Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a crucial role in overcoming this challenge. AI's processing power enables businesses to analyze data rapidly and at scale, such as in network management. AI can help security analysts detect and respond to potential threats, such as ransomware, malware, and data breaches. AI's predictive capabilities allow it to even begin learning and identifying patterns in network traffic, ensuring IT teams can anticipate performance changes and prevent threats before they occur. These use cases save businesses significant costs, minimize downtime, and help them adopt a data-driven, proactive, and agile operational approach.
Similarly, Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms are combining with artificial intelligence to enhance the value of business data. This is particularly transformative for customer experience, enabling businesses to track customer relationships at scale, analyze their behavioral patterns, and recommend the best ways to interact with them. The result is more personalized service for customers and leaner, ultimately more profitable operations for businesses.
In fact, to maximize the use of automation, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be combined with artificial intelligence to create intelligent automation. This enables a series of computerized processes to work together to perform simple tasks while accumulating and analyzing data at a faster pace. According to a Deloitte survey, organizations that have already implemented intelligent automation at a large scale have reduced costs by nearly 27%.
Enhance employee capabilities
Discussions about artificial intelligence still need to start with the technology itself. Some believe that adopting AI will cause massive job losses, with robots ultimately replacing humans. However, a growing body of research suggests that AI will actually have a positive impact on the economy. According to the World Economic Forum, AI will create 97 million new jobs and replace 85 million jobs by 2025. This new understanding is beginning to influence public debate. Recent trends from research firm Adobe Digital Insights indicate that while more people are discussing robots and jobs, the key is to approach it from a positive rather than a negative perspective.
Artificial intelligence is best viewed as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, human capabilities. AI provides humans with powerful analytical tools, capable of processing vast amounts of data and generating rich insights in seconds. Humans can then consider the resulting intelligence about the data, interpret its significance, and use it to plan and act, which can improve the quality of human decision-making. It is this understanding of context and causal analysis—understanding the intrinsic connections between factors—that truly distinguishes humans from AI.
As industry expert Brian Bergstein recently explained in MIT Technology Review, "AI's ability to discover correlations relies on algorithms processing millions of data points and then predicting outcomes. What they lack is the common sense that humans instinctively know the expected results of actions, not to mention the ability to reason about why things happen and to ask 'hypothetical' questions."
Finally, there are good reasons to believe that the AI-powered workplace will be a better workplace. By enabling employees to focus on more meaningful work and enhancing their capabilities in the workplace, businesses will begin to see a more productive and engaged workforce emerge. Improving employee satisfaction is more than just icing on the cake. Gallup's research found that business units with high engagement were on average 21% more profitable. Given the global shortage of digital talent facing companies in the tech industry, automating employee satisfaction may be a step in the right direction for businesses struggling to attract and retain employees.
Realizing the Business Value of Automation
While achieving automation in a business is not easy, here are seven steps to help your business get on the path to success:
(1) Proceed step by step
Don't rush. Businesses take the time to identify the business areas that can benefit from automation and develop a roadmap to make it a reality.
(2) Improve data quality
Data quality is crucial to the success of AI programs, and businesses need to invest in ensuring their data serves its intended purpose—racial bias issues in some AI projects often stem from potentially narrow or biased ideas in the training data.
(3) Personnel are very important
Automation can be a disruptive technology for business transformation, so it’s important to be transparent when adopting it, ensuring everyone understands their role in the automated workplace, and helping employees acquire the skills to adapt to this new technology.
(4) Continuous improvement
Track the impact of automation from the outset, taking into account the challenges faced by technology and employees, to ensure it always plays its most effective role in the business.
(5) Continuous innovation
Artificial intelligence is the future direction of enterprise development. In order to stay ahead of the competition, enterprises need to become the center of artificial intelligence innovation. Enterprises need to identify new use cases, connect to the broader artificial intelligence ecosystem, and cultivate the next generation of artificial intelligence talent.
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the economy, and businesses cannot afford to fall behind in market competition. In a survey conducted by MIT and the Boston Consulting Group, 84% of business executives and analysts said they believe artificial intelligence will enable their companies to gain or maintain a competitive advantage.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to automation. Businesses looking to leverage the benefits of automation have many options to deliver meaningful value to their operations, and this value will continue to grow as innovation accelerates.
