Automation is now at the forefront of digital transformation for enterprises across the world. Every organisation is looking for ways to incorporate automation capabilities into their business processes to stay ahead of the curve.
Robotic process automation (RPA) has been increasingly used to optimise and streamline business processes. In fact, it is expected that by 2021, the RPA will become a $2.9 billion market. While RPA has helped companies cut down on manual efforts, RPA tools are programmed to perform tasks based on a set of rules and triggers. They still cannot manage complicated business processes with dynamic and unstructured data–which is exactly where intelligent automation can help.
RPA: we take a look at UiPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere
What is intelligence automation?
Intelligent automation is a combination of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) which can be used to augment decision making, perform work processes, and solve problems.
By incorporating intelligence, automation tools can learn, analyse and make decisions for business processes which can, in turn, help organisations navigate through complicated situations without compromising on efficiency, speed, or decision making.
Some of the many real-world applications of intelligence automation include:
• Leveraging natural language processing and text mining to generate documents like purchase orders and invoices from emails or other unstructured data formats
• Analysing the behaviour of customers and recommending the right steps to make a sale
• Optimising business workflows automatically to improve overall efficiency
Intelligent automation to replace RPA, suggests AntWorks
How intelligent automation can help startups in staying competitive
Understanding and analysing large amounts of data
The amount of data we create and consume on an everyday basis is increasing at an exponential rate. For startups with small teams, the rapid growth of data means they need to find a way to learn, understand, and analyse data in a way that doesn’t take up too much of their employees’ time.
Intelligent automation can enable workers to effectively understand large volumes of information and drive insights from it by automating the entire process.
Increased efficiency and growth
We live in an economy where competition can be fierce, and it’s easy to fall behind your competitors due to slow growth. By incorporating intelligent automation in business processes, startups can cut costs, improve overall efficiency, provide differentiating services and products with new experiences and features, and enter new markets.
Process-centricity as priority
As more and more digital technologies start appearing in a company, it is important to have a process-centric view to make things more organised and less confusing. This becomes even more important with broader digital transformation and process management initiatives within an organisation.
Intelligence automation tools help create a process-centric approach for the employees, which in turn creates better customer experiences while managing governance and compliance.
What is digital transformation in business: Everything you need to know
Integrating RPA with intelligence automation
By combining rule-based RPA with intelligent automation, enterprises will be able to process large amounts of data and even automate complex business processes. Since intelligent automation leverages artificial intelligence, it can truly help achieve the new era of automation with even bigger benefits for startups.
Before you adopt intelligent automation, plan wisely
The cost of intelligent automation continues to decline as its capabilities grow, which can allow startups to easily incorporate the technology in their day to day activities in order to grow at a steady rate.
But before incorporating intelligent automation, startups should consider the following points and decide accordingly:
• Identify why you want to use intelligent automation in the first place- to innovate, grow, improve business operations, or anything else
• Choose and integrate the right technologies
• Acquire the information assets for machine learning applications
• Develop strategies to train your employees so that they can take full advantage of intelligent automation
• Asses and mitigate any risks before making big technological changes in your company
Taking automation to a new level
For startups that are already planning to implement RPA or have already implemented RPA, incorporating intelligent automation is the best idea to get ahead of the competition in this digital age where new technologies are being added every week. How can you find new ways to add automation to your core processes?
Written by Suresh Sambandam, founder of OrangeScape and CEO at kissflow
