While we have seen significant development in the year 2020 and 2021, when it comes to automation, the year 2022 will be the year of automation surge. One thing is a fact and that is that automation has never seen any sort of stagnancy. We have been witnessing constant innovation, change, growth and wider adoption when it comes to automation, across domains.
The following are 8 Automation Trends to know
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CIOs leading the automation initiative
Technology is a segment that is seeing majority of the automation, even some of the top research agencies such as Gartner has substantiated. A recent survey conducted by Gartner states that more than 80% of organizations have indicated continuation or in some cases even increase their spend on automation. This is where CIOs are stepping in and leading the initiative so that they can define the strategy, governance (or process) and technology.
As we see more and more investment happening in this space, CIOs have to ensure that it is spent wisely and strategically. Hence, we will see CIOs getting themselves engrossed in addressing pertinent issues such as:
- Which automation technology to be finalized and standardized?
- Capabilities to be delivered internally within the organization for this automation.
- Maintaining a balance between individual initiatives and organization-wide initiatives
- Ensuring proper governance, security and quality
Additionally, they are also contributing effectively towards the revenue side of the business and taking their inputs on how automation can further enhance the revenue of the organization.
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A battle between multiple platforms such as RPA, BPA, iPaaS, LCAP and AI
Those who have involved in this subject will be quite aware of the battle between various platforms who are fighting for the soul of automation technology. We players from every segment such as business process automation, to iPaaS players, low-code application platforms (LCAP), artificial intelligence platforms, robotic process automation players, have been inching forward to be on the hot seat or rather be the centra point of all automation technology.
The year 2022 will be the year where we will see various heads (CIOs per se) drive automation projects and work towards having a single technology platform for automation. There is already a perception built that RPA technology will emerge out to be a clear winner. We are already seeing a huge growth in RPA technology. According to a recent statistic by Gartner, RPA was already having a significant growth in the year 2020 where it was majorly used in enterprise software market; 38.9% rise to touch a staggering $1.9 billion in terms of revenues.
Then there are advanced RPA systems that are implemented to incorporate mission critical functionalities across enterprise such as governance, low/no-code development environments and provide support for scalability.
However, CIOs also know that RPAs cannot do everything under the roof. Thus, 2022 will be the year where RPA platforms will adopt two parallel channels.
Firstly, they will move to other avenues and look forward to integrating other platforms with their solution to make it a robust solution. Secondly, we will see a significant investment happening in the interoperability feature to the system. This means that from an adoption point of view, organizations can keep using their existing platform, and utilize RPA platform for management and governance.
Treading both paths will give an opportunity for RPA platforms to retain their position as core technology, and other automation platforms will merge into them.
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Automation climbs the value chain and boosts a new layer of engagement
In the current scenario, we can see that organizations have around 170 different applications that employees have to constantly toggle among these to get their work done. Because of this a considerable amount of time is spent in constant shift from one tool to another.
We are seeing innovation by many organizations where they are implementing digital desktop assistant or in plain language – a robot for every individual. 2022 will see adoption of another automation layer on top of the existing applications that they are using. This layer of new automation platform will reside between employees and the business applications.
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Emergence of JIT workflows as alternative to business application-based workflows
Typically, we see many enterprises get their work done by business applications such as Jira, shifting to Workday and then updating on Salesforce, and this goes on and on. However, in the year 2022, we will be seeing emergence of a new workflow model. Through this model, instead of employees going to multiple applications to execute their task, they will receive a series of JIT (just-in-time) tasks on their desktop, created by bots.
Having this approach will help people by freeing them from any sort of segmentation of work and constant shuffling between different applications. If we try to find an analogy of this mechanism, we can find it in the assembly line process that is adopted by the manufacturing sector. This is precisely the reason why 2024 will see around 25% of new employees in the development spectrum facing codeless development compared to multiple lines of codes that are written today to build applications.
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Dawn of the Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) to help in the AI space
The job CoEs will be to drive high success rates and ensure achievement of ROI for every initiative around artificial intelligence. In a recent survey conducted among AI professionals, it was noted that 64% of them said that their organizations took at least 1 month to implement any new AI model. On the other hand, the remainder of 20% said that their organizations took 6 months and beyond to do the same. This is quite a huge disparity and a pretty lengthy timeline.
Hence, we are seeing automation to be the obvious choice for organizations who are quite behind this journey of new model adoption. Today’s enterprise applications make sure that the AI models are very intuitive and fast so that the bots can quickly access the rules and build real time workflows for employees.
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RPA revolution using semantic automation
Year 2022 will be seen as the year when organizations will bring AI into the framework to make the process of automation easy, fast and extremely lively and flexible than they were ever before.
Today we are seeing that developers in automation segment have to give specific instruction to robots to perform steps, more like a guided instruction. However, with semantic automation, this rule-based automation approach is completely eliminated. Robots build through semantic automation process can perform tasks simply observing these tasks and emulating them.
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Flexibility in delivery resulting in innovation around cloud-based architecture
We are seeing tremendous amount of compartmentalization in the storage space and organizations are adopting native cloud for both SaaS as well as non-SaaS platforms.
Though it is not a matter of top priority in the automation space, however, delivery does sometimes become a pertinent factor in selecting an automation platform. Today we see lot of options, flexibility and relatively less lock-in time provided by some of the players. This has caused a major stir in the market, and we see many players coming up with platforms that have SaaS and on-premise options with minimum disruption.
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A new role that has been carved in automation space – Chief Sustainability Officer
Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) as they are called join hands with CIOs to harness the power of automation for the larger objective.
If we look at numbers, some of the Fortune 500 companies have 95 CSOs as of March 2021. The surprise element is the addition of one-third of these 95 happening in the year 2020. As we see a considerable effort by this new breed of officers, who want to achieve their objectives, quite a few of them are understanding the potential of automation. It is not a surprise that today CIOs have collaborated with CSOs to drive automation projects in the organization.
The year of 2022 will be the year of continuous and sustained growth across the business ecosystem. Follow these 8 Automation Trends with various functions which have intensified their efforts in their respective fields, and this has led to a significant surge in automation within their domain. Thus, the trajectory as of now is seeing an upward trend.
