Dive Brief:
- More than six in 10 executives credit automation with helping their organization address staffing shortages, according to an Automation Anywhere report released in July which surveyed more than 1,000 industry professionals.
- Almost all respondents said automation was vital to their digital transformation, according to the report.
- The move toward increased automation investment is a result of ongoing issues ranging from supply chain shortages to the talent crisis, according to the report.
Dive Insight:
Using digital tools to curb hiring gaps is not a new trend, but the current state of the tech labor market is creating new incentives for automation.
Automation has taken such a stronghold in business models that Forrester called for businesses to adopt a chief automation officer to their C-suite family in a July report.
In fact, bots — or digital workers as they are sometimes called — have become more and more present in the workplace. Almost half of respondents deployed 100 or more bots in 2022, a rate of deployment that far exceeded the 24% projected in 2021.
Businesses that have successfully deployed bots reported saving more time on tasks, improvements in productivity and increased quality and accuracy, according to the report.
But some businesses are hesitant to jump into automation adoption.
Organizations with legacy applications may find it harder to integrate automation into their existing processes, Brian Jackson, research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said in an email.
“Usually an automation process will be triggered by a specific event, and along the way to complete the process it will have to call on specific data to complete the task based on variables involved,” said Jackson. “That requires integration work and if your business is reliant on legacy applications you can run into interoperability issues.”
To successfully automate a process it has to be “well-defined and repeatable,” Jackson said.
Understanding the value of RPA is reliant on grasping the complex processes surrounding it. CIOs and tech leaders that have a firm grasp of the complexities of intelligent automation will be less likely to automate inefficient processes and wasting resources, time and money.
“Identifying the appropriate solution can take a lot of upfront investment and has no guarantee to work,” said Jackson.
