Ever since the early 2000s, businesses have invested heavily in automation efforts across their operations. Mundane and repetitive back-office or administrative tasks that needed considerable manual labor saw transformative changes with the introduction of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). These processes became faster, less effort-intensive, more accurate, and more consistent.
Fast forward to today, RPA is quite a common technology in almost all business sectors. By 2032, RPA is expected to have a market size of over USD 92.21 billion globally. However, it is important to note that this growth may not be fueled by the traditional model of RPA.
What businesses are looking to adopt today is the concept of hyper-automation.
What is hyperautomation?
In simple terms, hyper-automation refers to automation initiatives that focus on multiple processes simultaneously within a business’s operational landscape. It is a heavily scaled-up version of the standard RPA implementation. These automation approaches are powered primarily by data analytics and artificial intelligence.
While RPA focuses on running pre-written automation scripts, hyper-automation will focus on enabling business processes to be automated intelligently. Hyper-automation will result in autonomous decision-making for most workflow types, delivering more agility and flexibility along with speed.
For businesses that have embraced a digital strategy at the heart of their operations, hyper-automation will be the next big breakthrough. Gartner estimates that software that enables hyper-automation will be worth over USD 1.04 trillion by 2026. Enterprise leaders need to be aware of the possibilities that hyper-automation will unlock in terms of business value.
Here’s what they must know.
Is your enterprise ready for hyper-automation?
As we go further into a world where digital experiences are being seen as the de-facto customer expectation, hyper-automation is practically a must-have.
Let us explore some of the key possibilities that hyper-automation opens up:
Transform recruitment
Traditional recruitment workflows often involve considerable delays due to the manual processing of candidate profiles. Applications are screened manually by the HR team followed by staff from the business unit where the vacancy exists. Even then, there are possibilities of important qualities or key skills being missed due to manual evaluation. The workflow, while well-defined, is largely manual due to an expectation that each stage demands nuanced human judgment.
Through hyper-automation, even recruitment workflows can be enhanced and automated with AI and machine learning. AI systems can easily identify matching skills or qualities from the profiles of applicants in a matter of seconds. They can assign a candidate score that helps in identifying the competence of each candidate to the requirements. Furthermore, companies can even automate the responses they send to candidates and screen them for initial rounds.
Autonomous workflow management
With hyper-automation, employees can be relieved from many tasks linked to the manual updating of different business or communication systems. For example, some employees may update a work report in a task manager while others prefer sending the information over email. With AI, the required data can be automatically integrated into the desired workflow thereby enabling smooth and seamless operations. All filtering, forwarding, logging, etc. of employee requests will be managed by AI and this will result in better productivity and minimized delays in operations.
Additionally, when different digital systems are intelligently connected and automated, it becomes easy for employees to gain information through collaborative workflows. For example, the finance team can simply ask a virtual AI assistant to get data about an employee’s leaves, work schedule, performance grades, etc. while working on compensation requests. They do not have to go individually to each system and collect data. Hyperautomation brings the power of integrated collaboration between business systems on demand.
Real-time visibility
From an operational perspective, it is critical to have a clear understanding of who does what and when in the business. Transparency breeds better resource utilization, performance management, as well as better ongoing operational awareness. From managers to regional heads to even the IT team, there is a clear need to know the real-time status of people, assets, and tasks.
With hyper-automation, every crucial face to the important business systems can be seamlessly digitized and connected to form a highly intelligent enterprise framework. Powerful AI capabilities can be introduced which allow stakeholders to get a real-time operational snapshot at any point. For example, managers can simply query an AI assistant on a project status, the number of employees working on it, the number of issues still pending rectification, logs of past incidents, and much more. This is extremely useful when crafting customer responses. Businesses can deliver more accurate and timely responses to customers based on how their internal workflows are actually performing. With hyper-automation, all these facets are autonomously tracked, managed, and reported on.
Seamless application evolution
Today, all companies are software companies. There’s always an ongoing effort to build new applications, add a few features to existing ones, and modernize legacy applications. That effort can be significantly aided with hyper-automation. For instance, new features to applications can be easily added if there is an underlying intelligent framework that powers the business’s technology stack. Business users can simply use no-code or low-code platforms to build applications or features which can then be deployed with minimal support from the IT team.
Hyper-automation facilitates the autonomous maintenance of digital assets, development and deployment environments, and resource allocation like cloud storage, computational servers, support services, etc. The organization’s technology landscape gets a flexible and accommodative backbone thanks to hyper-automation.
There’s no doubt that hyper-automation will be a major catalyst for innovation and growth as far as modern businesses are concerned. However, the journey into deriving ROI from deep automation initiatives can be a challenge if a business doesn’t have access to the right guidance, technology, and people. This is where a technology partner like Trinus can make a major difference. Get in touch with us to know more.