When it comes to automation in the workplace, the initial natural tendency for many people is to avoid it out of fear that it will replace their jobs. However, this has turned out not to be the case. Automation instead has proven to aid people, helping them learn and develop new skills that are more valuable to their organizations and their own careers. The intent is not to replace jobs; the intent is to allow businesspeople to shift focus away from tedious tasks and more on rewarding and innovative tasks to help businesses excel and grow. Humans are meant to do innovative work, and automation is meant to do tedious and repetitive tasks.
However, automation technology hasn’t yet realized all its promise. It is still not widely accessible; rather, it has been embraced and put into practice at the highest levels of businesses. Hyperautomation, or the belief that anything that can be automated should be automated, will proliferate as these technologies become ubiquitous enough to reach small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
A New Standard for Resolving Comprehensive Business Challenges is Hyperautomation
The companies of the future in this space will be those that solve end-to-end business problems for their customers with a well-integrated suite of products in a single unified platform. This means providing an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) to build integrations, providing APIM (application programming interface management) to expose the integrations as APIs, providing an application builder and conversational AI tool that allows users to create mobile, web, and conversational applications using APIs, and integration built using iPaaS and APIM, all in one single unified platform.
Along these lines in the future, we will see the user interfaces (UIs), which users today interact with using applications, change to a chatbot or voice bot—essentially detailing the business need to build the appropriate application. Behind the scenes, bots can use integration, API, or sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) based services.
The key to staying ahead of these changes is by adopting hyperautomation. Gartner coined the term “hyperautomation,” and according to Gartner’s official definition, hyperautomation “is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.” In other words, businesses must combine the apps and systems they use to provide their consumers with goods, services, and solutions in order to achieve hyperautomation.
Here are a few ways that companies can take advantage of hyperautomation and its applications across business, consumer, and internal users:
The Key Applications of Hyperautomation
Companies must first start the journey of digitalization. They must ensure that their analog data sources and handwritten files are turned into digital files. Digitizing processes greatly enhance a company’s ability to shift flexibly and adapt to a changing business landscape. Following that, there are several ways in which they use hyperautomation to their advantage and apply it across the business.
For instance, if a tech company has technicians out in the field, and those technicians are reviewing the inventory management system, they are looking at items such as appointment schedules and invoices, so they might have to open various, different applications. IT teams need to learn and understand those applications, which can be difficult and complex.
With hyperautomation, you can take away the need for that. In such cases, you can use a chatbot to help make real-time decisions. Chatbots allow users to utilize a single mechanism to talk to many different applications. You ask the chatbot your question and the answer will be presented. Over time, the user interaction with these complex UIs will be reduced drastically, eventually to no interaction, and they will get used to talking to the chatbot.
So, in this case, technicians can ask questions such as, “Do I have inventory for this part?”; “Can you share the next open schedule time slot for me to visit this city?” It can answer these questions automatically as opposed to having to take the time to check manually by going to different application UIs. This creates the ability to reach whatever goal it is they’re trying to achieve without having to understand the various, different applications and their complex UI with countless options.
Another example of where this can be helpful is in the case of doctors and pharmacists. For handwritten prescriptions, doctors either have to type it or hand it over to the patient, and then the patient takes it to a pharmacy. With hyperautomation, doctors can take the handwritten note and generate a prescription for the pharmacist. From there, pharmacists can view it automatically through the digital system and share it with the consumer.
Or, consider the role of hyperautomation as an enabler for internal users such as sales representatives. They may need to know what their attainment is for the last five years. To find this out, they likely have to connect with someone in IT who can create a chart that displays this and is familiar with customer relationship management systems.
However, if they have an arc hyperautomation journey with integrating their systems using iPaaS and exposing them using the conversation AI app (i.e., Bot), they can pull the last five years of quota attainment instantly. In this process, the integrations and artificial intelligence are pulling the answers from internal systems back to the user.
As noted, hyperautomation has applications for a wide variety of businesses and use cases. The key is to understand how it can be applied to your specific business and be able to reap the benefits for both your company and customers.