How hyperautomation is entering the new normal of superpowered enterprises

Hyperautomation, thanks to Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) solutions, is one of the hottest disruptive technology trends driving a shift in enterprise operations across myriad industries.

In fact, Gartner ranked it in its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2021. Hyperautomation takes intelligent automation to the next level – it is essentially end-to-end process automation with minimal human intervention if required. This unlocks a new realm of possibility for rapidly implementing intelligent automation across a diverse range of use cases.

What’s the big deal?

In its nascent stages, hyperautomation was typically limited to fairly niche applications and use cases. However, thanks to the convergence of democratised IPA, cloud computing, and the growing challenge of processing unstructured content, hyperautomation is fast becoming the new normal across several industries, including shared services, hospitality, logistics, real estate, and more.

Hyperautomation can automate just about any use case that is a good candidate. It unlocks a new realm of possibilities where even highly complex business processes can be automated from end-to-end.

Many organisations start with a pilot use case and then expand to a broader implementation of IPA for hyperautomation. This typically yields quick wins from the pilot use case and enterprises have even reaped triple digit ROI in just a few months.

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Under the hood – what makes hyperautomation possible?

IPA solutions harness both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Some of the technology underlying the AI component includes Computer Vision, Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) along with document understanding capabilities.

While RPA can handle rule-based automation and mimic a range of human actions, the addition of AI has been a game-changer as it can automate the processing of unstructured content that previously required countless hours of human effort.

After the AI component handles the unstructured content, the output can be fed downstream by the RPA component, which can also automate rule-based actions and structured data. Thus, IPA is perfect for automating data-intensive, highly-repetitive processes.

The universal challenge of unstructured content

Over 90 percent of organisations struggle with the challenge of processing unstructured content in various media, and typically over 80 percent of business data is unstructured. Moreover, the problem continues to grow as this content is increasing at a rate of 50 – 60 percent per year.

The AI component of IPA enables the automation of processing documents, customer responses via chat and email and even images, audio, and video. Thus, the full-spectrum of unstructured content is made manageable thanks to AI’s capabilities and the synergy of AI and RPA enables hyperautomation.

Customer response and personalisation

In addition to surmounting the growing challenge of unstructured content, intelligent automation improves customer responses via chat and email, improving customer delight and retention.

NLP in particular enables user-friendly, conversational interactions while the IPA solution learns from historical data and thanks to Machine Learning keeps improving over time. The ability to keep learning from historical data enables a higher degree of personalisation that is likely to win customers over.

Democratised IPA enables digital transformation

The door to hyperautomation is wide open to enterprises of all sizes, thanks to the advent of democratised IPA solutions. With a low infrastructure footprint, they are quick to deploy and won’t break the bank. And, you don’t need any specialist knowledge to run the solution – the average business user can easily manage these convenient and user-friendly solutions.

Advances in algorithms also mean that you can easily train your IPA solution with a relatively small data set. Such solutions are flexible shaping themselves to a businesses’ processes and users can even create their own custom use cases and deploy the IPA solution to automate them in just weeks.

Thus democratisation has levelled the playing field, removing many of the obstacles that enterprises previously encountered when trying to implement intelligent automation.

Hyperautomation for the win

Hyperautomation, or even intelligent automation for chunks of processes, boosts operational efficiency tremendously. An often overlooked aspect of intelligent automation is that implementing IPA for a use case necessitates streamlining and improving the process steps for greater efficiency.

So the improvement is two-fold – an optimised process with technology that automates it along with improvements such as faster turnaround time, greater accuracy thanks to the elimination of manual errors, and scalability to handle surges in volume.

Leveraging this technology for feasible use cases leaves the data-intensive grunt work to the digital worker, while human employees are liberated from tedious tasks and can focus on what humans do best – using their creativity and insights for more value-driven tasks.

Hyperautomation’s digital workers keep learning and improving over time, thanks to Machine Learning (ML), the solution gets better and better at the task at hand.

Driving intelligent operations and innovation

An often overlooked aspect of hyperautomation is that it drives a digital transformation for a more intelligent mode of operations, not merely efficiency improvements. For instance, sales teams can close more based on the automated rapid responses to customers and a human finishes sealing the deal. IPA solutions that hyperautomate processes can ensure that team members at various levels of the enterprise have the insights and downstream outputs they need at the right time to make decisions and respond quickly.

Thus, IPA solutions enable agile business operations so enterprises can seize opportunities and react quickly to changes in market conditions. When functions such as IT, customer service, procurement, finance, and other operations are enhanced through intelligent automation or hyperautomation, they are able to function as an intelligent partner to the enterprise aligning with business goals and better business outcomes.

In our modern era, enterprises face tremendous competition and pressure from a range of factors – volatile markets, hungry and agile startups, the unceasing demand to do better, do more and do it faster and then there was the global health crisis.

In an unpredictable future, sustainable success belongs to organisations that can drive long-term value, and innovate rapidly adapting to changes faster than competitors. But 44 percent of CEOs are of the opinion that their rate of technological transformation is inadequate to support innovation. Another survey found that over 50 percent of CEOs feel that their organisations lack innovative processes that enable adaption and swift response to disruptive circumstances.

Hyperautomation that drives streamlined operations that span multiple functions and systems within the enterprise can drive a more agile and adaptive stance to change.

In addition, liberating human employees from data-intensive grunt work frees human creativity and intellect to innovate better with a strong foundation of hyperautomated systems that can scale and pivot to adapt to changing circumstances.

Robust enterprises to face future uncertainties

In the aftermath of the global pandemic, many organisations have had to explore new ways of working remotely to keep team members safe. IPA solutions that enable hyperautomation provided the perfect solution to many enterprises and operations that needed to remotely manage their processes and human employees.

This ability is invaluable as it enables continued business operations under a range of adverse circumstances – natural disasters, political unrest, health crises and more. Therefore harnessing IPA can empower enterprises making them more robust and resilient against future uncertainties.

Thus, hyperautomation, by leveraging IPA solutions effectively, grants organisations superpower in terms of improving operations, making them more intelligent, driving better business outcomes and ROI, and ultimately reshaping business operations through a seamless blend of processes, technology and people.

Thanks to democratised IPA solutions, these superpowers will rapidly become the new normal for the majority of enterprises and those who fail to harness this technology risk falling by the wayside and being outpaced by the competition. Therefore, it is imperative to harness intelligent automation and hyperautomation to bolster your enterprise for a sustainable future and success.