What You Need To Know About Intelligent Automation Tools & Technologies
Increased competition, unpredictable market changes, and changing customer expectations have organizations rethinking their operations, prioritizing speed and efficiency to improve agility. Enterprises across all industries are exploring ways to use and apply intelligent automation solutions to reduce manual work, unlock cost savings, and free up employee resources to focus on activities that can drive the business forward.
But what is the technology behind intelligent automation and how can it benefit you?
What Is Intelligent Automation?
Intelligent automation merges artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation technologies to streamline increasingly complex processes, achieve greater efficiency and data accuracy, and enable the operational agility and flexibility organizations need.
When implemented effectively, intelligent automation enables smarter, more dynamic business processes that can learn and become more efficient over time.
Intelligent automation comprises both strategy and technology, going far beyond the rules-based, task automations of robotic process automation (RPA), which is traditionally limited to use cases involving highly-structured data.
But with the wrong tech stack, businesses can find themselves drifting further away from operational efficiency—restricted by existing processes and systems with high maintenance and overall total cost of ownership.
How Does Intelligent Automation Work?
As noted above, the goal of intelligent automation is to make business processes faster and more efficient. To do so, intelligent automation solutions seek to enhance several areas of a company’s workflow, including:
Data Extraction & Classification:
Data classification is the process of organizing data into categories, making it easy to retrieve, sort, and store for future use.
Data extraction, on the other hand, is the process of collecting data from various sources, especially when those sources are unstructured. Data extraction makes it possible to consolidate, process, and refine data so that it can be used by downstream systems to inform decision-making.
Intelligent automation solutions frequently use a human-in-the-loop (HITL) interface to involve a human employee when needed, ensuring greater accuracy than what straight-through processing can offer.
Data Validation and Enrichment:
Just like it sounds, data validation is the process of ensuring the accuracy and quality of data. Data validation is implemented by applying business rules and leveraging external databases and API services to ensure the consistency of input and stored data.
Data enrichment is the process of enhancing existing data by supplementing any missing or incomplete information. Data is often enriched through the use of external data sources.
Insight:
Insight is knowledge gained from analyzing data. Analysis of this information provides context that helps businesses make informed decisions, and also reduces the risk that comes with trial-and-error. If data is the input, insight can be considered the output.
Intelligent automation makes use of advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology to apply capabilities such as relationship identification, text summarization, sentiment, or intent analysis to extract the necessary insights for improved decision making.
Additionally, intelligent automation solutions offer out-of-the-box reports for full visibility into the performance of the automated processes, showing metrics like automation and accuracy levels, throughput, and usage information.
Integration:
The Intelligent Automation platform must integrate seamlessly with other systems and applications in the ecosystem to do the necessary cross validations and provide them with accurate, actionable data.
What Is Intelligent Document Processing?
Intelligent document processing, or IDP, is a powerful example of intelligent automation in action, helping organizations increase efficiency and accuracy when dealing with huge volumes of data.
“Intelligent document processing is an area in which AI technologies are having a tangible impact on everyday business operations. There are exciting opportunities in applying these technologies beyond simply improving the efficiency of back-office business processes,” said Neil Ward-Dutton, vice president for AI, Automation, and Analytics, IDC Europe. “Organizations looking for ways to apply AI pragmatically today should prioritize investigating intelligent document processing.”
IDP technologies add value by increasing agility, as well as automation scope and rate, and helps process documents with greater speed and accuracy than traditional optical character recognition (OCR) technology. While OCR converts scanned images into machine-encoded text, typically transcribing it character by character, IDP captures data directly from diverse document types (e.g., email, text, pdf, and scanned pages), categorizes, and extracts relevant data for further processing using AI.
Choosing the Right Solution for Your Business
Implementing intelligent automation is a practical way to use AI to elevate business operations and drive value. With intelligent automation, you can optimize processes, eliminate backlogs, reduce errors, increase employee productivity and retention, and improve overall customer experience.
But that doesn’t mean all solutions are created equal. There are varying standards of what an ideal solution is, what capabilities it should have, and the value it can bring.
So, how do you select the right solution for your business needs?
It can be difficult to navigate the evolving intelligent automation landscape and select the solution that will work for your business now and in the future. A successful framework for intelligent automation requires:
- Strategy—knowing the “what” and “why” for implementing new technologies
- An understanding of the breadth and depth of automation capabilities
- Robust criteria for evaluating and selecting new technology
- A roadmap for deployment, including mapping out the processes and resources needed to design, develop and implement
Intelligent automation technology continues to evolve, so it’s important to prioritize a solution that will help achieve current goals and also grow and adapt as your needs change.
5 Benefits of Intelligent Automation
No matter what industry you are in, the transformative potential of intelligent automation enables you to reimagine how your business operates, and the benefits are multiple.
- Automate business processes end-to-end
The need for human intervention decreases as the intelligent automation solutions continue learning, lowering the amount of required manual labor. - Minimize errors and improve data quality
Achieve new levels of accuracy and automation in your data entry processes to improve the quality of your data across all your systems. - Increase Employee Productivity
Employees that no longer need to handle low-value, repetitive tasks can be re-deployed into other areas of work that require attention. - Improve Customer Experience
Improve customer satisfaction by removing backlogs, delivering faster response times, and offering more accurate, consistent outcomes. - Ensure Compliance
Greater accuracy, full operational traceability, and tighter tolerances assist organizations with maintaining mandated industry standards.
What Intelligent Automation Success Looks Like
Change is always a challenge, and it takes time to fully integrate new tech, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be wins along the way. A top-notch intelligent automation solution will deliver high rates of accuracy and automation out-of-the-box, and it will continue to get better over time.
Before you invest in a new solution, map out what success looks like for your company, including benchmarking metrics to compare with future results.
When organizations have access to accurate data, customers receive better and faster service and answers, and employees can turn their attention to a wider range of different tasks that will drive the business forward.
How We Work
At Hyperscience, we understand the importance of providing efficient ways to assist businesses with their switch to intelligent automation. We pride ourselves on the ability to provide both out-of-the-box, and customizable solutions, to allow your business to thrive using intelligent automation.
The Hyperscience platform is the perfect solution for businesses seeking automation through the power of machine learning. The implementation of our solutions has seen companies from all industries reduce costs, minimize mistakes, and process more data, faster. This positive impact is then mirrored in the end customer experience, as the customer receives better care.
We also provide exceptional customer support, taking the time to work alongside your existing team to ensure that the rollout of our Hyperscience platform is smooth, efficient, and provides a positive strategic impact on your business—allowing it to truly thrive.