Over the past few years, we’ve heard from numerous pundits who have painted a dystopian picture of the demise of white-collar jobs at the hands of automation. It surely is an eye-catching headline there, but trust you me, once you scrutinize the facts, automation is indeed about liberation from the mundane and about driving digital enablement within an enterprise. It’s true that some jobs will be eliminated by automation, however, we don’t see the new digital worker as a replacement for humans, but as an enabler to becoming an intrinsic part of the material of a future workplace.
What is a Digital Enablement Platform?
A digital enablement platform is a software designed to assist people with performing digital tasks and improve their productivity in the digital workplace.
Financially, if you look at it the problem is quite huge. There is a $5TN worth of productivity lost annually due to the repetitive tasks and only 3% or maybe fewer organizations have been able to scale up their automation journey. So, there are still 97% of businesses that need to democratize their process automation.
In the past couple of months, industry experts have stated out how digital workforces will take up responsibility, mostly for, repetitive, and productivity-busting tasks, not entire jobs. In the following years, artificial intelligence will have multiple life-changing outcomes. Still, the one possibly mostly relating to science fiction will be the rise of self-efficient mechanical systems, a genuine automated machine with the ability to decide on its own.
The best example of the automated machine is self-driving cars, which have gained immense popularity recently, and the manufacturing industry will be witnessing the impact of AI-driven automated technology.
Or another example for the same would be that of Printing Press. Before the printing press came into being, information was siloed and available to only a few in the society but with its democratization, we could all be reading books and newspapers from the comforts of our homes anywhere in the world.
Then came the internet era, while there were search engines before as well, the internet made it possible for people globally, to have access to information by browsing from anywhere. News and updates were very well democratized.
The third stage, software came into existence; Here we talk not just about software development, but the business processes too got democratized.
Phew! That’s process automation for you guys.
What is the Democratization of Technology?
The democratization of technology refers to the method by which access to technology rapidly continues to become more accessible to more people. New technologies over the years and improved UX/UI’s have empowered and supported those who aren’t too familiar with the nuances of the tech industry in order to access and leverage technological products and services.
Times are changing, and new ideas are being shared more often than usual, in an effort to help push technology forward at a faster rate to bring change. In a major shift, technology isn’t just available to big corporations anymore or developers for that matter. In fact, consumers are ready to gain more access to high-tech equipment and buy sophisticated technological products. In addition to the present, these people can participate in the development of products and help push technology further. This means more people today are performing on helping technology progress than there have been before, and this is often obviously speeding up the general process.
When thinking about the democratization of technology, scholars often compare it to when the printing press led to information being brought to the masses in a much broader way. After the invention of the press by Gutenberg within the early 1400s, it had been possible to urge information to more people and therefore the machine had a serious social impact. The internet is that the modern-day equivalent of this and has had an equivalent effect but on a way larger scale. Now people from everywhere on the planet can instantly communicate with one another and share ideas in a matter of minutes.
The internet has not always been this hospitable to the general public, however. It was actually invented in 1969 and was initially used as a way of communication between scientists and within the government. It wasn’t until the 1990s that innovation became available to everyone on the planet.
Why Democratize Workflow Automation?
A KPMG report, “Rise of the Humans 2”, indicates that the concept of humans and robots working together to deliver an outcome is becoming increasingly important. Indeed, when employees and smart, enterprise-grade RPA robots – meaning people who understand the context, derive meaning, and anticipate change to deliver better and faster outcomes – work collaboratively, it can make for an immensely powerful partnership. The removal of monotonous tasks not only makes for happier employees but also allows them to take on higher-value roles.
There is nothing new about the process of abstracting knowledge into computer software. We’ve been doing it for decades. We have done this by learning and mapping out patterns. And once they become established, we turn those patterns into rules the computer can understand. But there are limits to how complex those rules can be.
Democratizing process automation will deliver a wide range of benefits to the business whether it is about driving top-line value, improving bottom-line profit, or reducing risk.
Some of them are:
- Reducing customer churn with robust execution of CSR (Customer Service Requests).
- Increasing insights with reporting of process anomalies.
- Achieving faster time to plug through automated launch processes.
- Reducing “cost to serve” by automating manual processes.
- Cutting out on operational risk by collecting every nuance of every process transaction.
- Defending against fraud with real-time anomaly reporting, while lowering the value of compliance.
- Saving and reporting every step that happens in every process.
What is Intelligent Automation?
Intelligent Automation is also considered to be a term that describes a holistic solution for digital transformation, mainly supporting business process management (BPM) to orchestrate users, tasks, systems, and robots (RPA) relying on the business needs at each moment.
Combining machine learning technologies and artificial intelligence with your OCR or Intelligent Data Processing can actually help you extract a lot of unstructured data from your business; especially if we talk about industries like banking and insurance.
THE 4 PILLARS OF INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION
Gartner in its top trends for 2020 has defined democratization as one of the key pillars which essentially means, making automation accessible to everyone in your teams.
1. Business Process Management (BPM)
BPM may be a process automation technology that has the efficient coordination of individuals, systems, and data.
The objective of BPM is to make sure that the operational and business process infrastructure is solid. Therefore, it acts as a base layer in the organization, automating the behavior of complex processes that require people to intervene in data entry and decision making, the use of systems at specific moments like calculations or integrations, control of actions, and data generation and storage.
2. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic Process Automation may be a technology that aims to scale back human intervention in computer applications, especially in repetitive tasks that change little or no in each iteration.
RPA works primarily by interacting with “high level” applications, which are the software layers at the graphic interface level, as opposed to machine language or programming code. Put more simply, it’s a kind of software that emulates the important interaction that a person would have with conventional computer applications.
3. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is the imitation of human intelligence by machines. In other words, it is the discipline that tries to create systems capable of learning and reasoning like a human being. Artificial Intelligence encompasses other concepts such as Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Visual Recognition, Big Data, etc.
4. Integrations
The connection and integration between systems are one of the biggest headaches for a company since each system or software has its own peculiarities. They usually offer an Application Programming Interface (API) to interact with, which is usually supported some standard like SOAP (applied in Web Services) or REST (based on HTTP protocol)
The Promise of Automation
Cloud Friendly e-workforce Platform
Get started with instant activation on the cloud or download community edition for on-premises.
User-Friendly Automation
Low code platform to help users connect data and build workflow across the entire business.
SaaS Cognitive e-workers
Leverage pre-built templates across Finance, HR, Procurement, Sales, Marketing, and eCommerce.
Pay-as-you-go Pricing
Eliminate per-bot license costs, scaling automation as required.
There is no easy answer. It’s a combination of understanding the job to be done and the limits of today’s technologies. If we identify the jobs to be done, we can have a look at what that job entails and think of what we would need to have to be able to automate it fully. When we heard that Amazon had opened a store without any people at the checkout we were bewildered, didn’t see that one coming in the least.
At supervity.ai, democratization is very close to us as it has powered not just business users but humans across different generations, all over the world.
supervity.ai is one such digital enablement platform that envisages e-worker intelligence automation to all your mundane workflows. We at supervity.ai believe that users should not have to worry as to which software/technology to use; Rather consider the process. Providing an end-to-end business solution with the help of our automation e-worker.
Leveraging our in-house automation expertise, we have transformed these processes by training and deploying bots to take over these processes, in a completely unattended mode,
thereby releasing human bandwidth for cognitive work. In addition, we achieved an accuracy of 100% with a complete audit trail and the timely availability of the reports.
We believe investment in such edge technology platforms will shift the finance division’s role to being a strategic partner for the business.
Conclusion
The main objective of the digital enablement platform is to improve customer and employee experience and boost productivity. Democratizing automation inevitably significantly reshapes how employees feel regarding their unique and better roles. Implementation of the automation process or RPA is the key to a successful organization in a new way.