By 2022, increasing intelligent automation trends will boost digital transformation at a high rate.
With digital transformation, intelligent automation has gained immense importance mainly for process management to orchestrate users, tasks, systems, and robots (RPA) depending on the business needs at each moment. Intelligent Automation contemplates the use of analytics and AI (especially machine learning) to make automated and intelligent decisions, and case management to provide processes with enough flexibility for end-to-end case management success. In this article, we will focus on the top intelligent automation trends and predictions for 2022.
As predicted by Gartner:
By year-end 2025, over half of the world's population will be subject to at least one internet of behaviors (IoB) program (private, commercial, or governmental).
By 2025, 40% of physical experience-based businesses will improve financial results and outperform competitors by extending into paid virtual experiences.
By 2024, organizations with IT teams that understand the needs of customers will outperform other organizations' customer experience metrics by 20%.
By 2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services, up from 20% in 2020.
Organizations across industries from financial services to retail, healthcare to education are leveraging new tools and technologies to provide new, virtual services. The race is now on to improve the customer experience by creating new digital processes that optimize those services. Data, artificial intelligence, cloud services, and the internet of things (IoT) will provide a foundation for emerging digital technologies organizations will need to maintain a competitive advantage.
Robotics Adoption
It's common knowledge among SMBs that they can't afford large, complex robots as these technologies don't fit their limited floor space, require specialized personnel to program and maintain them, and are simply too expensive, with a payback period that is too long to justify the investment. But a new generation of collaborative robots (or "cobots") is changing the game for smaller manufacturers, helping them compete more effectively, offering new opportunities for employees, and even improving worker safety. As of 2Q 2021, more than 2.7 industrial robots have been operating in businesses worldwide.
Like other trends in technology, intelligent automation is essentially removing long-standing limits of what people can do. A major area of growth is the continuing bold initiatives into factory and innovation automation, which have been producing exciting outcomes for industrial and business deployments. Service providers are among the leaders in robotic task automation, enabling employees to focus more on enhancing the client experience. Hospitality business players are deploying robots to make room deliveries to guests in hotels and resorts and even as far as their residences.
Customer Support Chatbot
Chatbots had been transforming business-customer interaction for years. In 2022 and the coming years, chatbots for customer support are expected to take the centre stage as more and more businesses are deploying them in their websites to boost customer engagement. They're not only available 24/7, but they can also seamlessly interact with every website visitor, with definitely zero waiting time whatsoever.
Automated Process Discovery to Fill Your Pipeline
A collection of automated process discovery technologies is starting to make waves by helping organizations understand processes in a whole new light. Though not focused solely on automation opportunities, these technologies will provide process-related insight not gained by any other means. Process mining, task mining, and up-and-coming conversation mining are all tools that can improve process discovery and improvement initiatives.
Intelligent Automation to Scale Your RPA Efforts
Anyone on the RPA journey understands that one of the things missing from their current automation is intelligence. This isn't just the ability to make random off-the-cuff decisions. It includes any action completed by a human's eyes, ears, mouth, or brain. In short, it means seeing, hearing, understanding, communicating, and making decisions. As once expertly put by Professor Leslie Wilcox, if RPA takes the robot out of the human, intelligent automation puts the human into the robot.
Intelligent automation makes use of many complementary technologies to RPA. These capabilities include the kinds of work humans do now: looking at an invoice, reading an email, deciding to approve a loan application, or communicating with a customer. It's these and many more actions that make up most of our current processes. This is why most important tasks cannot be automated with RPA alone.
Process Intelligence to Monitor Process Health
Process intelligence is how enterprises will monitor processes in the future, especially manual processes. There are many stories of organizations that aren't getting the return they expected from automation. This is often because the processes aren't monitored over a long enough period and just aren't understood well enough.
This is where process intelligence comes in. It adds data and intelligence layers to improve the way you monitor the ongoing health of your processes. As workplaces become more and more hybridized with on-site and remote workers, monitoring processes and staff will become even more important. Process intelligence will take the guesswork out of staffing needs, budgeting, SLA projections, and much more, even when processes are still being completed by people. Intelligent automation will penetrate your organization only so far, at least with the way current processes are designed. Unless you plan on transforming every process in your business to be suitable for automation, process intelligence will become a necessity.
Accessibility Testing
With more companies going digital, there's a need to create software that is accessible to all our customers. The need for accessibility testing will be even more significant in 2022. Individuals who have disabilities are relying on digital services more than ever before for everyday activities (remote work, education, healthcare, banking, shopping, etc.) That means you should be software testing the accessibility of all the software processes your team is developing. 2022 will see a jump in companies investing in accessibility testing to improve their customer experience.
More Automation
The most important prediction for software testing trends is the need for more automation in 2022. The world of technology is moving at a rapid pace, and it's difficult to know which emerging technologies to pin your hopes on. However, automation capabilities will help you build the proper foundation to make sure your processes help instead of hinder future business planning. These technologies are already becoming a reality in some leading organizations and will become the norm by 2025. Getting on board early will accelerate your existing automation efforts and pave the way for a future autonomous enterprise.