Intelligent Automation Could Be the Missing Key To Your Digital Transformation Success

As business leaders are challenged to do more with less, intelligent automation has become an increasingly promising solution to help tackle current as well as future challenges. This article by Pat Geary, chief evangelist at Blue Prism, assesses how intelligent automation via digital workers can alleviate resource constraints and support digital transformation efforts.

In this challenging climate, there’s a growing realization across global boardrooms that now is the time to really start digitally transforming work. What’s also become very clear is that the organizations that fail to act will be left struggling to respond effectively to the ever-changing market and stakeholder demands. Instead, they will have to rely on slow, inefficient processes, legacy IT infrastructure, rigid structures, and constrained resources. 

An increasingly compelling route to performing work much faster, smarter, more efficiently – and with fewer resources than before is intelligent automation technology running a digital workforce. This workforce is an AI-powered, ever-evolving resource that’s ready to be trained by human colleagues to deliver ever more complex work across the front, middle, and back office in any industry sector. 

It can operate with total independence, hundreds of times faster than people, with zero errors, 24/7 – and it’s able to learn from and mimic humans to further enhance its capabilities. Not only can this digital workforce be deployed and trained by human colleagues, it ultimately liberates them to focus on work that requires a human touch and suits their innate skills. 

Organizations are going further by embedding digital workers at the core of their business transformation strategies. Digital workers swiftly and accurately perform data-driven, end-to-end activities across multiple operating environments consisting of manual workflows and legacy systems that are complex, disjointed, and difficult to modify. This intelligent automation has universal interoperability — it can be easily used by businesses, tested safely in a company’s IT environment, and swiftly drag-and-dropped into enterprise process flows once approved. 

Digital workers can use any existing and even future technology by uniquely accessing and reading the user interface without any coding. They can easily leverage artificial intelligence, in-depth analytics, and other cognitive capabilities – including natural language processing, speech recognition, sentiment and risk analysis, machine learning, and reasoning. By augmenting these capabilities, they can perform evermore complex activities that drive digital transformation across the enterprise at scale.

Learn More: How Organizations Can Establish Self-Sustaining Automation Programs

The Impact of Digital Workers Across the Enterprise 

A recent reportOpens a new window surveyed 6,700 knowledge workers and senior IT decision-makers. The findings revealed that92% of respondents viewed digital workers as an important factor in driving digital transformation, allowing them to swiftly scale the deployment of other emerging technologies. 

Enterprises are employing and integrating these technologies so they can identify patterns of use or previously hidden behavior. They’re streamlining operations and eliminating costly, time-consuming, and error-prone activities to accelerate decision making and services, driving better customer experiences.  

With enterprises now able to leapfrog from the past to the present and into the future at an unprecedented pace, the world is seeing a new culture of accelerated innovation that would have been impossible before. To compound even more value, all automated innovations are being re-used, adapted, or expanded by business teams, enabling collaborative working. 

No legacy systems need to be ripped out, and no major process change or mass data migration is required. Digital workers simply breathe new life into systems. The transformation that would traditionally be cost- and resource-prohibitive suddenly becomes easily achievable.

Crucially for the enterprise environment, everything is done securely, compliantly, and transparently, as there’s a centralized irrefutable audit trail of all process automations, including all digital worker actions and training history. This, coupled with digital workers never impacting the IT estate, prevents technical debt and digital chaos, which wins the IT department’s approval as well. 

Consider these examples of digital work in action and the resulting impact for the organizations and their employees. 

• A bank reduced processing time for check approvals from 7 minutes to 20 seconds using a combination of digital workers and AI vision tools to perform 38 automated checks on every signature with 100% accuracy.

• A pharmaceutical company used digital workers, optical character recognition, analytics, and data visualization tools to greatly reduce clinical cycle times, product labeling, and shipment reconciliations, getting essential medicines to patients more quickly across the globe.

• A global education services provider has deployed digital workers alongside its human workforce to support internal and external services. 

Digital workers orchestrate AI and cognitive capabilities to manage the acquisition of rights and royalties from a complex network of suppliers of image, audio, text, and video content. By integrating digital workers and intelligent optical character recognition, the company has also simplified and accelerated the process to check and verify credentials and conduct a seamless applicant on-boarding validation process.

Learn More: Cloud Misconfigurations: A Surging but Overlooked Threat

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, to gain the best results with digital workers, having the best methodologies and human talent is key to success. Once an operating model is defined upfront, including an ambitious, inspiring vision of desired outcomes backed by senior stakeholders, you can start delivering and widely communicating achievements. 

This allows the digital workforce to really thrive as it scales across the business. At a time when digital transformation initiatives are more critical than ever to remain competitive, the forward-looking business leaders who leverage intelligent automation and the limitless possibilities it creates will be best positioned for future success.

What are your thoughts on the role of intelligent automation in digital transformation success? Let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!