Hyperintelligent Automation: The Next Paradigm In IT Evolution
Almost every business, large or small, has taken automation seriously. Especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, the race to automate processes and workflows has become more intense.
In the pre-Covid era, automation was an option, but in the post-Covid, digital-first world, hyperintelligent automation has become necessary to survive. CIOs and decision makers must ramp up their efforts and investment to transform manual processes and simple automation to end-to-end or hyper-intelligent automation.
According to Gartner, the worldwide market enabling hyperintelligent automation was expected to reach $596.6 billion in 2022.
What is hyperintelligent automation?
Hyperintelligent automation is a combination of next-gen technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation (BPA), intelligent document processing (IDP), machine learning (ML) and process mining. Together these technologies work in sync to rapidly identify, vet and automate business processes at scale.
Many of us call it hyperautomation as well; both terms are interchangeable. It has been a strategic business game-changer due to its potential to decrease human intervention in business processes to many extents. Moreover, hyperintelligent automation is considered one of the significant drivers of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0.
Hyperintelligent automation is the need of the hour.
Since we are doing business in a customer-centric era, hyperautomation significantly revolutionizes the customer experience and boosts business decisions leading to innovation. To achieve unified and streamlined processes, consider prioritizing hyperintelligent automation.
When RPA combines with AI, it enables innovation. You can experience this change in everything from data collection and processing to analysis and decision making. In an unprecedented era of disruptions, organizations are looking at hyperintelligent automation as a tool to become agile and resilient and as an accurate method for digital transformation.
If you think hyperautomation will remove humans from the equation, then you would be mistaken. Keeping humans in the process loop is the significant differentiator of hyperintelligent automation. It is a process in which humans and technology work together using collaborative intelligence. It allows your employees to use automation to their benefit and achieve AI-assisted decision making using machine learning.
Adopt hyperautomation in phases.
Hyperintelligent automation in itself is about making smart decisions and intelligent choices. You must select the proper process and apply the right mix of technologies to achieve hyperautomation on a broader scale.
• Understand processes and customer journeys. Identify the top-level processes to automate using multiple business architecture methods like SWOT analysis, value stream mapping and balanced scorecards.
• Define and set automation priorities. Perform objective analysis to get complex data insights about processes needing immediate automation. I recommend leveraging data analysis tools to analyze the current state of manual processes and how they perform after automation. In the end, compare the results from multiple scenarios and set priorities for automation.
• Automate repetitive and error-prone processes. Consider leveraging robotic process automation to automate mundane human tasks lacking a programming interface. Implement RPA as a metric to increase productivity, but also consider adding intelligence.
• Augment critical human decisions. Artificial intelligence and machine learning help increase the efficiency of your decisions. Usually, these decisions require human intervention to enhance their impact. For example, chatbots can interact with customers for initial queries, reducing human work and offering immediate customer satisfaction.
• Build hyperintelligent automation applications. Business process management, case management and decision management tools can compile end-to-end process-spanning systems. This leads to automating more granular processes. ERP systems, low-code development tools and cloud-based service architecture help you assemble multiple components in result-driven applications.
Don’t go extinct—evolve.
As a business leader, your view of hyperautomation initiatives can decide the fate of your organization in achieving successful business results. Optimizing workflows and automating processes reduces the friction between business and IT processes. Here are some tips for implementation.
• Strategize and plan multiple concurrent initiatives to achieve successful hyperintelligent automation.
• It is better to collectively identify major tasks and processes that need to be automated rather than going for full automation at once.
• Keep your employees in the loop throughout designing, building, scaling, governing and augmenting the hyperautomation roadmap.
• “Co-operate,” “co-own” and “co-create” are the principles to increase the likelihood of successful hyperintelligent automation.
Hyperintelligent automation is not just hype or a passing topic of discussion; it’s an initiative to maximize the potential of automation across all business spheres. Apart from time savings and precision, the benefits offered by hyperintelligent automation are often siloed and hard to scale. It is not just about the best tools to automate a process but using it wisely to benefit the organization.
