Artificial intelligence and automation are sweeping the business world. Each has benefits that will allow organizations to improve efficiencies and grow their businesses.
Automation isn’t new, says Accelirate’s Chief Automation Officer Ahmed Zaidi. But the recent wave of solutions and vendors has been fueled by the advent of new technologies that make it easier for companies to adopt and scale these solutions and transform their business processes.
Zaidi joined Max Lien, Head of Partnerships at Hyperscience, for a webinar to discuss how enterprises can scale their intelligent automation technologies to maximize time-to-value and allow their people to focus on what they do best. Below, we’ve highlighted five key takeaways from their discussion.
Insurance and financial services are leading the way on automation.
Lien describes several macroeconomic trends that are impacting financial services and insurance specifically, forcing them to run more efficiently.
Lien said, “There is a tremendous amount of pressure on these organizations. Which is why we’ve seen banking, financial services, and insurance organizations adopt a wide breadth of automation technologies” to help them focus on their core businesses.
Zaidi added that while these industries are leading the way, automation isn’t confined to a few specific verticals. He said they’re seeing growth across a wide range of Fortune 1000 companies. In order to reap the early benefits of automation, it does require some economies of scale — large enterprises have the volume of work to help manage and reap the immediate benefits of automation.
Automation centers of excellence are impacting adoption.
“What we’ve seen spring up in the past several years are centers of excellence or digital transformation teams. It’s been inspiring to see organizations invest in those capabilities and upskill the organization in automation,” said Lien.
According to Zaidi, businesses that are adopting automation currently are looking at the bigger picture now. “We’re now seeing trends where folks initially started with the low hanging fruit and tested out some of these platforms and technologies that were new,” he said. “But we’re now seeing that enterprises are … looking at a process end to end and looking at the pieces and what technologies fit to those pieces and then applying those all together.”
Go in with a plan.
“Our advice to all our customers has been don’t look at capabilities first, look at the process first, then figure out which capabilities you can address with a vendor,” Zaidi said.
“The barrier to entry we’ve seen is getting alignment from the business and the different process stakeholders,” adds Lien. He said companies need to establish the business case up front before investigating all the acronyms (ML, OCR, AI, RPA, etc.) available.
“Before you navigate the myriad of technologies that are out there, figure out what are the set of use cases you want to solve,” Lien said. “The business processes you think you can accrue the most value to the enterprise.”
RPA is the orchestration technology.
In its relatively short life, Zaidi said RPA has gone from simply automating a few specific processes with structured inputs and repetitive generic tasks, to having established integrations with other companies to include all sorts of various applications for companies.
“There is a harmonious relationship between RPA and Hyperscience and other kinds of technological capabilities as the business looks to expand,” said Lien. These partnerships allow RPA vendors to help companies expand to other business processes that are high value or high impact from an automation perspective.
Utilizing an automation expert like Accelirate as an adoption partner will allow companies to identify their use cases and then find the tools and integrations that will best help them achieve their automation goals.
Automation is best for customers.
A lot of the talk around the benefits of automation involves focusing on the bottom line for companies and increasing productivity for individual employees. However, Lien says one benefit fueling the current automation wave is customer experience.
“One of the biggest impacts of automation is helping end customers have better experiences with their enterprises,” he said. Lien shared the example of a customer submitting a claim to an insurance company.
Traditionally, without automation, customers submit a claim — often by mail — and, wait weeks, or maybe longer, to have it manually entered into the system and processed by their insurance company. Customers often don’t know whether it’s been processed or there’s an issue until weeks later when a payout is received.
With automation, companies accelerate the processing of these documents (whether mailed to a central processing center or submitted via an online portal), meaning customers are able to have a check in their hands faster than previously possible.
To get started on your own automation journey, start a conversation with Hyperscience to see what business cases we can help you solve.
