2016 marked the beginning of the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" when Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman and Founder of the World Economic Forum coined the term. The first revolution saw the world running on steam engines, the second saw the mass production of goods and the third introduced digital technology to society. Each of these revolutions brought along fundamental transformations to society. While you are reading this, you are a part of the fourth industrial revolution, by the courtesy of intelligent technologies which includes intelligent automation as a key part.

Intelligent Automation Is Providing End-To-End Automation To Businesses

Also known as IA, Hyperautomation, or Cognitive Automation, is one of the most popular trends in the field of AI (artificial intelligence). Intelligent automation is a combination of technologies involving people, businesses, machine learning, robotic process automation, and more. This technology assists businesses to automate end-to-end business processes in a digital environment and delivers required outcomes on behalf of the employees. In the end, it improves customer satisfaction and gets more profits.

Intelligent Automation Boosts Business Efficiency

Though IA is a recent concept, it has made its way quickly in the business world. More than 50% of the world's big companies, like JP Morgan, ANZ Bank, Netflix have adopted this technology and saw their business efficiency grow to 20% to 60%. By adopting IA, every industry can reap such benefits.

Intelligent Automation Is Enabling Remote Working During COVID-19

The economic and organizational chaos caused by COVID-19 called for a more resilient system to support society. All the industries, especially healthcare, managed by a majority of the human workforce were under extreme stress during the initial stages of the pandemic. While hospitals were in severe need of support, IA stepped up and solved the problem. Hospitals had quickly adopted telemedicine and automated their front desk, first response activities, and early diagnosis processes. This automation made hospitals less reliant on their workforce, giving them the opportunity to focus their potential elsewhere.

Intelligent Automation Is Improving Employee Satisfaction

According to research by Gallup, 85% of employees around the world are not happy with their work as it is mostly manual, too repetitive, and tedious. IA takes care of this issue by automating most of the repetitive and mundane tasks, freeing the employee to partake in other business responsibilities.

Intelligent Automation Enhances Customer Experience

Customer satisfaction and retention are crucial for businesses. It has been observed that 96% of unhappy customers don't bother giving constructive feedback and 96% will simply leave and never come back. For businesses, IA helps create innovative and customized products and experiences which will target the customer's present need. Applications like AI will provide 24/7 support to the customers, increasing their satisfaction by 50% and reducing the company's workload by over 50% by relying on bots.

IA Is Reinventing Our World

IA is shaping the future of industries and business to such a level that nothing might be the same in a workplace in the next 10-15 years. To benefit from this advancing technology, education needs to be adapted to fit the future workforce demands. It needs to focus on a person's competitive edge, creativity, and life skills as most of the tasks will be automated by machines. From an economic perspective, the use of disruptive digital technologies like IA has started to create wealth inequalities. To counter this, it is necessary to implement equal wealth-sharing mechanisms like Universal Basic Income.

Intelligent automation can help us create a better tomorrow, in both work and societal front. One will give us more to focus on the kind of work we actually want to do and the other will refocus on doing what we love apart from work, which is family, love, caring, and coexisting on our planet