COVID-19 Proves the Worth of Intelligent Automation for Business Continuity

Call it machine-enabled automation or machine's intelligence, the essence remains the same. When we talk about automation today, it is not something usual rather an absolute amalgamation of smart technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence. Or commonly known as Intelligent Automation or Automation Intelligence.

The crisis-induced by coronavirus has taught us that such technologies are recession-proof and are even essential for a business to answer the highs and lows, ups, and downs of the industrial ecosystem. In a nutshell it a quintessential aspect for business continuity.

One of the biggest lessons learned during this time has been the need to be flexible, to be proactive, and to respond quickly. And investing in intelligent automation solutions can help. That's especially true as employees have moved to remote working.

Internal processes or requests that used to be carried out in person now need to be thought out more clearly. High-volume processes or requests should be automated. In fact, entire workflows should be mapped out and automated to improve efficiency and processing speed — to help ensure continuity.

Citing its own experience with the COVID-19 upheaval, an Automation Anywhere blog quotes, "In terms of automation in our own company during the pandemic, in the early stages, when we were thinking about critical applications and how to ensure their uptime and availability, automation ensured the right tasks in the team were assigned and other processes handled."

Intelligent Automation also helped with communication. At one point, the company wanted to communicate to its shelter-in-place staff the latest company news as well as words of encouragement. To that end, Automation Anywhere created a software bot. It reviewed key systems and made sure the company had the latest, accurate staff information from those systems. Then, Automation Anywhere migrated that information into its emergency outreach system to deliver texted messages to keep its people up to date.

Furthermore, Intinfotech recognizes Automation Intelligence as 'The Herculean Tool' to renew business continuity.

Anoop Tiwari, Senior Corporate Vice President at HCL Technologies mentioned in a blog that the early indications of the COVID-19 outbreak were first detected by intelligent automation systems. For example, in December 2019, a Canadian health surveillance company called BlueDot first noticed some anomalies in Wuhan China. The company's machine learning-based solution ingested and analyzed a vast data set that included airline travel routes, livestock reports, health organization records, along with many other data points. Using this data, the system was able to detect a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in the region that was similar to the 2003 SARS outbreak. The system was right and nine days later, the WHO happened to declare the emergence of COVID-19. Such systems are already proving to be instrumental in order to track the spread of the outbreak and take steps to minimize exposure.

According to him, similar applications of intelligent automation are also being deployed across numerous other domains in the battle against COVID-19. A key area being the efforts toward inventing a cure or treatment to the coronavirus. Typically, the process of finding a pharmaceutical cure can be tedious and time-consuming. However, with intelligent automation tools driven by AI and ML, scientists can develop vaccines, discover existing drugs for current applications, and design drugs that can prevent future outbreaks. And while the development in this domain is in its early stages, the current crisis is giving it the impetus needed to accelerate their growth.

Other areas of application for intelligent automation also include proactive monitoring programs, such as the Baidu AI-powered scanning system which uses infrared sensor systems to monitor body temperature. This automation solution was deployed in Beijing's Qinghe Railway Station as a means to detect passengers who may be potentially infected. The zero-contact scanner could examine the temperature of nearly 200 people per minute without disrupting the passenger flow at the station. By using tools like this along with other intelligent automation systems, we can see how this technology is instrumental in mitigating the potential damage of this pandemic.

This shift created by pandemic posed massive challenges to business operations as it forced the single largest migration of people to a work-from-home model in modern memory. And while the operational challenges were immense, this was only the beginning, as the real challenge remained in ensuring productivity, business continuity, and operational agility. Under such circumstances, the collaboration between human and machine tools and the matchup of intelligent automation vs. COVID-19 became critical toward ensuring business success.

Anoop says, "Automation, in any form, whether physical or virtual, has already been the next paradigm shift in business, just waiting to happen. And while we've been steadily evolving on this trajectory, advancing scale and service in exceeding increments, the current crisis has shown us how important it is for business to support their workforce and adopt a "digitalCOLLEAGUE" approach."