Machines and artificial intelligence will be the newest recruits to the workforce, bringing new skills to help people do new jobs, and reinventing what’s possible.
The real power of intelligent automation lies in its ability to fundamentally change traditional ways of operating, for businesses and individuals.
These machines offer strengths and capabilities (scale, speed, and the ability to cut through complexity) that are different from – but crucially complementary to – human skills. And their increasing sophistication is invigorating the workplace, changing the rules of what’s possible so that people and their new digital co-workers can together do things differently.
Intelligent automation is being used across multiple industries to create new value for businesses and society alike.
Natural language processing: finance companies apply NLP to compliance and fraud prevention by monitoring electronic communications at financial institutions to identify relationships and entities across threads.
Computer vision: law enforcement uses computer vision on facial recognition systems to identify or verify a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source.
Knowledge representation: healthcare providers use a system to analyse massive amounts of data to extract useful sections, such as doctor names, costs, and number of complaints, in order to create a clean and easy way to find the root cause of declining clinic performance.
Reasoning and planning: automated planning and scheduling, typically for execution by autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles, from warehouse to retail store to household.
Fundamental Change in IT
Rather than just being looked at as an add-on, AI now represents a fundamental change in how IT systems are built.
As a new foundational layer of IT architecture, an increasing number of tools are being created that allow machines to become more sophisticated in how they learn and make decisions. This means that the process of actually automating these tasks becomes much easier.
Examples abound: from Google’s now open-sourced image-recognition software to IPsoft’s AI platform, Amelia, that automates knowledge work and is able to speak to customers in more than 20 languages.
It is important to note that incorporating artificial intelligence into the business will not be a trivial task. For a start, enterprises will have to redefine both their business and IT architectures.
The use of artificial intelligence at each layer means that firms will be essentially doing things differently, and that includes incorporating AI as a new and important layer in that architecture.
Technology leaders already see the amazing potential of intelligent automation and how it will inevitably pervade every aspect of business, but all enterprise leaders must also now look beyond the potential of automation to simply cut costs.
Innovate and Evolve
What will that mean in practice? Intelligent automation will enable enterprises to innovate and evolve by increasing their agility, reducing the complexity of systems and operations, accelerating their time to market, and creating the ability to experiment continually with new products and services.
It’s not just in IT systems that automation is driving real change. It’s happening out in the physical world too: improving mining safety by letting men and machines work side by side in a way that takes the most dangerous tasks off the shoulders of people (for example, using intelligent “worms” to monitor hazardous mining operations), changing the rules of e-commerce by driving ever closer to same-day delivery (such as the 30,000 Kiva robots helping Amazon to meet rising customer demand) and easing urbanites’ lives with intelligent street lighting and predictive traffic control.
Intelligent automation thrives when it’s paired with people to drive better outcomes.
Businesses will only be able to manage the enormous wave of complexity that arises from pervasive digital change if they can seamlessly harness and integrate, at scale, everything that’s coming their way – new products, new services, new technology tools, new business models, new alliances, new ecosystems, and more.
Meeting that challenge demands new skillsets and a very different workforce. And that will be made possible by the pervasive introduction of intelligent automation – the essential new co-worker for the digital age.
Intelligent automation isn’t an option, it’s mandatory. The question is whether you have the capabilities to not just use it, but also implement it across every aspect of your organisation and maximise the benefits.