Intelligent Automation combines a finely balanced amalgamation of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The technology enables businesses to accomplish end-to-end process automation, streamlining operational complexities and expediting growth to keep businesses ahead in hyper-competitive markets. As businesses move ahead and plan for 2020, intelligent automation has become a top priority for many executives.
Over the last few years, many enterprises have poured massive capital in RPA and it is expected that spending in this technology will reach nearly US$2.4 billion by 2022. Also, it is anticipated that the market for RPA will worth US$5.9 billion by 2025.
While RPA in some way cannot handle the complexity of real-world businesses, including subjective decision making, unstructured data, and human interactions, intelligent automation delivers significant promise to conquer these challenges. It has the potential to automate processes with unstructured data.
Here are some of the top applications where intelligent automation is proving its capability to assist organizations in driving business efficiency.
While data is at the core of every automation project, intelligent automation systems rely heavily on real-time workforce analysis and predictive analytics. It is significantly focused on assessing the automated processes to tune them and adapt to changing environments, and augmenting ROI consequently. Following a change in customer behavior or significant interaction, the technology is able to make predictions about a customer, such as whether they are at high churn risk. With predictive analytics, process owners, as well as other stakeholders, will have a clearer picture of the processes inside the company like what works well and identify bottlenecks that exist in the processes.
The foundation of any successful business encompasses satisfied customers which is essentially driven by personalization in the contemporary market. Offering products for individual customers based on their history can be a strategic imperative. This will be constructive for consumer-facing and retail-based industries. In this context, using intelligent automation to fine-tune processes and evaluate customer data is a crucial way to lower the time spent by employees through data and freeing them to focus more effectively on customer services.
In the business ecosystem, human error is common but it becomes critical when it occurs in the data entry process. This can lower business accuracy, skew statistical outcomes as well and put a massive impact on all aspects of a business process. This can even lead to severe data breaches as most of them are a result of human error. Thus, in this way, the intelligent automation system can significantly minimize the risk of human error by leveraging software bots that are configured to tackle the repeatable tasks like document processing, often assigned to human employees.
For almost every industry, making a forecast, whether be it for products and service delivery or customer preferences, is very difficult and challenging. Intelligent automation here can be beneficial as it gleans real-time and local data, and then applies it to spot unforeseen bottlenecks and improves accuracy. On the other hand, it is essential to optimize routing and identify issues proactively, especially in logistics as this is crucial to the long-term productivity of an enterprise. The logistics industry consists of a complex set of systems where products are passed on from manufacturers to suppliers, distribution centers, retailers and finally to the customer. So, intelligent automation enables preventative action for problem cases, by providing real-time alerts to related teams.
By leveraging intelligent automation, businesses can achieve significant cost reduction that was previously employed for human workers to perform tasks around the clock. In fact, the use of this technology often results in savings from 40 percent to 75 percent over time, delivering a greater return on investment. This surge in cost savings is realized thanks to the ability of intelligent automation to work constantly, without taking worries about work hours, and eventually boosting business efficiency.
So, as intelligent automation delivers considerable applications to businesses, it will make incredible changes in years to come. And to realize the capabilities of the technology, enterprises must lead with a process-first approach that can create positive employee experiences and seamless workflows across the enterprise.
