Adam Devine, VP and Head of Marketing for WorkFusion
Enterprise companies in every industry struggle with the same fundamental problem: how to unchain revenue growth from cost growth. Adding headcount to do more work and executing custom IT projects to automate some of the work adds scale, but costs grow in lockstep with any increase in revenue. Born-digital businesses such as Amazon and Google have a significant operational advantage through the native use of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), which drive exponential growth while keeping costs in check. But how can born-analogue companies achieve these margins and improve customer service?
Most businesses have made great strides in digital sales and marketing, but operations have fallen behind. McKinsey estimates that over 60 per cent of data collection and processing can be automated with technology available today, and PwC estimates that AI will drive $15billion in value by 2030. Software bots that learn are the present and future of business growth and will help born-digital companies create digital operations.
Until recently, AI was considered too complex and expensive for enterprise operations, but that has changed in the past five years with the advent of AI-driven robotic process automation (RPA), which seamlessly integrates AI into business processes. Common functions such as customer onboarding in banking, claims handling in insurance and F&A functions such as accounts payable and order-to-cash are filled with repetitive systems work and unstructured data processing that require lower-level human judgment. AI-driven RPA can automate systems work through rules-based bots that perform tasks as humans would on UI of applications or through API calls. Cognitive bots learn patterns from historical data and human actions and automate more complex work. The combination of both automates a wide variety of high-volume, mission-critical work within weeks of deployment.
When companies achieve digital operations, everyone wins. By being freed from repetitive work, employees are able to focus on more meaningful, value-added work and deliver better customer service. Customers win with faster response times and more personalised, accurate service. Company leaders win not only through expanded margins but also with the operational agility to break into new services, products and markets. Unlike electricity, which took 30 years to make its way into factories, AI-driven automation will likely take a third of the time or even less to transform the way companies work.
For information about achieving Digital Operations, visit www.workfusion.com