The world of work is evolving due, in part, to The Great Resignation and the world adapting to new norms introduced by the pandemic. Amid constant change, companies realize that the old ways of working no longer work. Companies need fresh ideas and new approaches to support employees to compete and thrive. Ted Kummert, EVP, products & engineering at UiPath, shares key insights into how automation is enabling the evolution of work as we know it.
To thrive in our era of constant change, ubiquitous automation, and continual digital transformation, it is essential to pay attention to the trends redefining work, to understand how businesses should strategize, and how automation will have a meaningful impact to help companies succeed. Let’s take a closer look at how organizations can leverage automation on their journey of work evolution.
Operating as a Digital Business
Over the years, companies have adopted technologies to help them get ahead of the competition, like cloud, mobile, and web. Now, companies are squarely in the automation-first era, and digital businesses that automate and orchestrate workflows are positioned to thrive. Organizations that embrace automation see employees’ job satisfaction and productivity increase. Employees can focus on more value-added responsibilities and hone their creative skills instead of spending time on mundane tasks.Â
To remain competitive in the new world of work and win the war for talent, organizations must focus on employee wellbeing and development. Companies must implement technologies to make employees more productive and take the time to reskill and upskill their employees for the digital roles of the future.
Automation helps companies optimize their workforces and build digital capacities where there are gaps in the workforce. For example, Bryan Johnson, Chief of Staff at U.S. Xpress, a trucking company, saidOpens a new window that automation has helped the company become a digital and more nimble business. U.S. Xpress can better predict trucker turnover, providing employees with superior experiences to retain talent.Â
Currently, companies may be concerned about how the rise in inflation may impact their business. But digital businesses that leverage automation may find that automation can drive fast productivity gains that can offset inflation, helping companies stay on track. With so many benefits of automation present today, companies should start familiarizing themselves with how the technology is evolving.Â
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Automation Is the Application
Automation can provide numerous benefits, but companies must learn to create custom applications that incorporate workflows across unconnected applications, discrete data sources, and siloed activities. To be successful, companies need to have a greater automation capability.
It’s becoming increasingly unsustainable and taking a toll on productivity for companies to manage thousands of fragmented software applications. When companies put automation at its core, they can create digital processes, workflows, and integrations to make work seamless across complex enterprise landscapes. This way, companies can make faster progress toward their digital business goals by freeing up employees’ time to focus on more critical tasks and enabling new business processes and capabilities for the entire organization.
As digital transformation journeys continue, there are several components that companies must be mindful of when evaluating an automation implementation:Â
- The set of integrated platform services: Employees work with applications of every size and type while performing their jobs, so the automation an enterprise selects needs to be able to handle a vast diversity of simple and complex processes and technologies, including API integrations. Ideally, the automation platform should also use AI and ML models, support short and long-running processes, and offer enriching user experiences to provide seamless integrations across services.Â
- Increased development capacity: Automation of the future will contain low code and visual experiences that don’t require traditional coding skills so that any employee can become a citizen developer. This way, employees outside the data science department can build what they need for themselves and their teams to streamline their own processes and win the war against the backlog.Â
- Robust and integrated AI and ML capabilities: Companies should look for partners who think of AI and ML capabilities in two ways. First, the platform should leverage AI and ML internally to supercharge its own capabilities, like powering computer vision and document understanding. The second way is that the platform should make it easy to incorporate AI and ML into applications and cross the last mile from data science to full production.Â
The Future of Automation
Together, these components will power the next generation of automation applications. Moving forward, automation will be the application, where the technology will be available wherever needed in enterprises. As a result, employees will operate with an automation-first mindset to create new processes and introduce new businesses and services.
Automation is no longer a “nice to have†solution. Instead, it’s a strategic imperative for the modern enterprise to enable employees to reach their full potential and empower businesses to accelerate their growth. Automation is changing work for the better.
How do you see automation driving change in the way you work? Share with us on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to know all about it!