By alleviating the strain caused by workforce displacement, supply chain challenges, customer service disruptions, and more, artificial intelligence-powered automation has been a vital lifeline for businesses over the last two years. The advent of automation has also empowered individuals to work more efficiently and effectively, allowing them to devote their time to more valuable and strategic tasks. In fact, according to the recently conducted Global AI Adoption Index 2022 by Morning Consult on behalf of IBM, over half of IT professionals in India report their company is currently using or considering automation software or tools to drive greater efficiencies in IT operations (52%) and business processes/tasks (53%) and to give employees valuable time back (55%).
Currently, India is at the cutting edge of technology and innovation, with many companies, cities, and even entire regions increasingly adopting Automation technology. This has empowered businesses to provide better service and more efficient operations, both of which are beneficial to the company and its customers. By leveraging automation and artificial intelligence, companies and governments are enhancing service delivery and productivity to benefit society. In a digital-first world, automation adoption is expected to accelerate in six key areas in the next few years, resulting in more meaningful applications across industries.
- Increasing the role of AIOps: With AIOps, organizations can use artificial intelligence to simplify IT operations management, accelerate and automate problem resolution, and prevent IT issues before they arise. The use of AIOps can also help IT teams identify patterns in data that will indicate whether a potential issue may occur, allowing them to prevent IT problems from occurring in the first place.
- Citizen developers emerge: Tooling around automation is expanding beyond helping workers with specialized skills in highly specific contexts as they become easier to implement. Advancement in natural language processing, explainable AI, and self-service AI, when embedded in Automation platforms will allow their reach and ease of use across marketing, sales, and other depts. Through new, user-friendly, low-code/no-code interfaces, workers in these functions can use automation increasingly to manage paperwork and employer relations, conduct research, and access key figures. As a result of access to the right data and ease of customization, the "citizen developer" will be able to identify new use cases by integrating existing solutions into their own workflows.
- Employee experience and productivity driven through Digital workers: A shortage of skills and labor is leading many organizations today to search for ways to free their employees to work on more valuable tasks. Digital workers can be of great help here. HR, sales, and marketing employees are often swamped with repetitive tasks like scheduling meetings, updating calendars, requesting agendas, and sending reminders. By automating these repetitive tasks with intelligent automation solutions interactively driven through natural language and deployed in the form of digital workers, employees can reclaim their time to focus on what matters most. These digital workers will perform tasks along with human workforce and will act as multipliers achieve scale and optimization.
- Synergy and convergence of business and IT: There will be synergy between business processes and IT infrastructure driven by automation platforms allowing the organizations to have end to end convergence on operational and financial management. The AI driven automation technologies will be able to correlate data and events that occur in an IT infrastructure and software stack to the business processes that get impacted by those events and perform remedial actions to keep processes running while adhering to security and compliance requirements.
- Boost Security and Compliance: According to a RedHat survey, 47% of businesses implement automation tools to improve security and compliance. Automating vulnerability identification and patching allows businesses to take proactive measures and address vulnerabilities before they occur. Similarly, intelligent software can learn what constitutes normal usage and detect risks such as violations of security policies. Hybrid work practices have also increased security risks in homes and in distributed regions. Over the next year, a cybersecurity mesh will be used to reduce the financial impact of cyber incidents by establishing boundaries around individual devices rather than the network. As establishing manual security boundaries on devices is impossible, automation will be a crucial part of this cyber-security strategy.
- Reshaping the future with hyper automation: As opposed to being used in piecemeal projects, automation will drive the modern digital enterprise. Using multiple, integrated technology capabilities -- such as low code platforms, machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA), hyper automation refers to scaling automation across the enterprise through the reuse of processes. Hyper automation will also be significant in the customer service sector. Considering their proximity to changing customer needs, customer service teams can benefit from workflow automation in terms of increasing their flexibility, productivity, and job satisfaction.
As we look to the future of work, it is evident that India is uniquely positioned for automation economy. To make the most of it, businesses must turn to AI and automation to become more resilient, more innovative, and more efficient in order to remain competitive. From reducing simple menial tasks from human to-do lists to creating composable event-driven IT architectures, automating a wide range of business processes will be an important focus of digital transformation efforts in 2023 and beyond.
The author is Vishal Chahal, Director IBM Automation, IBM India Software Labs