Using intelligent automation to empower teams for enterprise-wide innovation

Imagine you are a leader at a financial service company and your team is tasked with reviewing and evaluating hundreds of thousands of financial documents to check for alignment within company policy.

This cumbersome and manual review process takes a massive amount of time and leaves plenty of room for errors. How can businesses work smarter and streamline their workflow to optimize efficiency and accuracy?

While automation might appear to be the obvious solution, it lacks the contextual thinking and cognitive skills necessary for making informed decisions. Intelligent Automation (IA), a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, incorporates both technology and human reasoning. It makes processes smarter, operations more efficient, and eliminates the manual effort for labor-intensive, high-volume tasks.

Research shows that automation on its own is no longer enough for businesses, with a 70 percent increase in executives choosing to invest in more forms of AI, including intelligent automation.

IA works by sifting through vast sets of data, becoming more sophisticated with every piece of information it digests. Through embedded cognitive algorithms, IA focuses on continuous learning, adapting to deliver more knowledgeable and accurate decisions.

The learning aspect of IA is what primarily differentiates it from automation. Whereas automation prioritizes performing tasks quickly and in real-time, artificial intelligence adds the value of quality.

For this reason, IA is being applied to financial, medical, and even political services, where there is zero-tolerance for errors or ambiguity. Use cases range from the conventional collection and analysis of information to solving high-stake business problems with robots and making critical decisions for self-driven cars.

Eighty-two percent of business leaders feel pressured to get in front of their competitors by continuously modernizing their operations and processes. Companies left and right are undergoing digital transformation and implementing IA solutions to improve business processes and enhance their customer experience.

Today’s consumers are used to easy digital experiences in all areas of their lives, and they expect companies to keep up with the changing digital economy. By streamlining workflows and reducing manual tasks, IA enables teams to focus on high-stakes, customer-centric issues, opening new doors for revenue opportunities and reducing operational costs.

While the first thing companies might think of when they hear IA is technology, digital transformation solutions that involve automation and artificial intelligence touch all areas of a business, ranging from operations and innovation to technology strategy and information management.

With IA, a retail company can deploy a chatbot that can respond to customer questions in a fraction of the time of a human. Additionally, a healthcare service can implement a data processing tool that can easily analyze large quantities of information in order to determine a cause of clinical performance. IA can also help teams meet customer needs in real-time as well as determine the next best action in a matter of seconds.

In order to successfully implement IA across an organization, business leaders will need to first account for their people.

One of the biggest challenges of IA is dealing with company cultures that aren’t on board with innovation. After all, employees of an organization will be using the technology first-hand and will need to complete training for new adjustments. IA is complex and finding the right solution is not a one-stop-shop.

Organizations and their internal teams will need to keep an open mind in testing new ideas and be willing to embrace experimentation to achieve the best outcome. Since IA requires changes that can be high-risk, organizations will also need a strategic partner of their choice to implement the technology and mitigate any problems.

IA is no longer just the future; it’s now the present. If companies want to keep the business of their customers while gaining new ones, they need to be open to new ways of modernization. The purpose of IA isn’t to replace humans but to complement them and empower them to tap into innovation.

So, what possibilities can IA unlock for your business? With the right tools and strategy, the sky’s the limit.