The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Of Intelligent Automation

Today’s need for automation is real and is not going away. It is undeniable that the intelligent automation market is going through a rapid democratisation process and societies we live in are somehow more inclined to coexist with virtual cognitive workers. The end-goal of automation is no longer perceived as a Kafkaesque nightmare of unpredictable and uncompromising robots.

By Ralph Aboujaoude Diaz.

From automation that just “execute” (data centre automation to robotic process automation) to automation that “think” and “learn” (autonomics, cognitive computing and ultimately the holy grail of true artificial intelligence), the intelligent process automation market is growing at fast pace and in an orchestrated manner. This market is now projected to exceed $US40 billion by the year 2020. 

Three major indicators are, slowly but surely, reinforcing the belief that intelligent automation will be part of our future:

• Near-confirmation of expectations due to increased knowledge and education of stakeholders (positively or negatively affecting the intention to use intelligent automation).
• Substantial increase in adoption (driven by more industrialised, content-based and cost-effective deployment).
• Perceived immediate and future usefulness (based on more compelling use cases, success stories and market trends).

The next-generation business ecosystem is naturally emerging due to a societal and technological shift towards more acceptance and usage of automation. The constant quest for more intelligent automation will be a promising and rewarding journey but without any doubt a tumultuous a complicated one…

Getting the right intelligent automation strategy supported by appropriate technologies will need proper thinking and planning. Will intelligent automation just serve specific purposes and contexts (running processes that require extensive “swivel-chair” access to multiple existing systems or increasing cognitive capabilities in targeted sub-processes) or will it be used to holistically and gradually transform the workforce environment across the organisation?

Building commitment from senior leadership towards large scale adoption of intelligent automation will be a long journey. Let’s be realistic here, there is still a long way before knowledge-based virtual workers can accurately start to gather unstructured data without pattern, process rules based on dynamic languages and ultimately make complex judgements. 

There is no doubt that in order to be successful and widely adopted, the intelligent automation journey should be considered as a strategic initiative. But how to convince and get the buy-in when benefit realisation plans are difficult to determine because too many variables are involved and unknown?

Overcoming cultural resistance to automation and managing the change will require planning, discipline, and effective communication. Don’t underestimate the business technophobia and operational fatigue that has been built up during the long and tedious IT and Business transformation years. Some form of IT literacy and skills will be required in order to assimilate and embed intelligent automation.

From an IT perspective, will IT functions feel that intelligent automation is another burdensome project that will stretch resources and create additional maintenance and support activities? 

In addition to key drivers such as end-to-end process optimisation, real-time data-driven insights or risk and compliance intelligence, cost reduction will remain the primary driver for investing in intelligent automation. It is evident for example that the targeted adoption of RPA will bring tangible cost reduction but how advanced intelligent automation as a whole will actually create business value and boost agility?

There will be non-negligible security concerns regarding the risk of the entire intelligent automation environment being vulnerable to internal or external data breaches and potential data manipulation. Now that intelligent automation is actually increasing the level of digitisation and networking, how to ensure that the intelligent automation environment is reliable, secured and cannot be tampered by intentional fraudulent cyber activities (accessing the robot controller to re-calibrate processing logic and sequences, altering master data or extracting data logs, etc.)

Significant co-investment between organisations and service providers for defining and aligning intelligent automation strategies will be the norm. Money will be spent on preparing business cases, running proof of concepts, determining how to scale up the pilot and defining target operating models. Offering large discounts, putting fees at risk and defining value-based revenue will be common practices. But one thing is sure is that intelligent automation tool providers will be the big winners!

There is no doubt that established service providers (the likes of IBM, Accenture, Cognizant, TCS, Wipro, etc.) have built extensive intelligent automation capabilities via accelerated development of proprietary technology (Watson, Holmes, Trizetto, ignio, etc.) or strategic alliances with mature off-the-shelf technology vendors (IPSoft, SyntBots, etc.). In addition to that, an HfS survey has revealed that almost half of organisations (buyers) want to roll out intelligent automation with their existing service providers. 

The unanswered question of resource reallocation mechanisms needs to be addressed in a holistic and procedural manner. Training future employees and re-training current ones will be a significant challenge. But how will the resource reallocation process will actually be executed and who will pay for it? Will it be easy to reallocate a resource to another existing function/ process by “augmenting” skills? Or convert an accounting data entry/ reconciliation person into a virtual agent calibrator or a data insight curator?

IDM:     Ralph Aboujaoude Diaz is Senior Manager, Risk Transformation Services, EY UK.