As COVID-19 spreads and leaves an economic upheaval in its wake, almost every industry and business has felt the impact. Many companies are downsizing or freezing their budgets, and line-of-business owners are forced to be creative with smaller budgets. In response, leaders are tasked with improving the productivity of their teams and reducing operational overhead, all while maintaining quality to reduce costly errors.
Within every great challenge also lies opportunity. As companies struggle to do more with less, leaders have found success by looking past traditional IT solutions and embracing a growing technology strategy called digital operations (digital ops).
Digital ops applies today’s artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) technologies to streamline workflows, eliminate human error, and reduce costs while boosting productivity. The current adoption rate of AI and RPA is growing by 40-60% per year, which is set to accelerate in 2021 as businesses adapt to the new normal.
Let’s look at five positive ways AI and automation are changing the way organizations do businesses:
1. Optimized productivity – Get more done with significantly less
Imagine removing all the tedious tasks you dread doing each day. Automation has reached a level of sophistication where it can streamline even the most complex business processes. When leaders apply RPA solutions, it can free up team members from monotonous, repetitive, and manual tasks to focus on higher priorities, such as business development and customer experience. Consequently, RPA can save precious working hours, as well as improve the overall company's work/life balance and employee satisfaction. Saving time on these tasks can also reduce the overall employee costs.
2. Minimized time to insight – Find what you need at lightning speed
Combining eDiscovery with RPA and AI can multiply a solution’s value by 10x. Within sectors such as journalism, law, publishing, financial services, and government, workers spend hours collecting, organizing and evaluating documents. The process of scanning and mining large amounts of data provides a perfect opportunity for artificial intelligence (AI). Automation tools reduce manual search time through intelligent mapping that automatically identifies and creates associations, revealing novel insights. AI can reduce overall analysis time and give people the chance to focus on high-impact insights.
3. Agility to adapt – Optimize your process dynamically and add flexibility
Automation and AI platforms are built to be customized. Digital operations not only uses data to understand what’s effective, what’s not, and optimizes dynamically, but also provides flexibility. These solutions can be customized based on your company’s unique processes, practices and concerns.
4. Flexibility across platforms – Work across even the most complex IT ecosystems
Automation tools have the capability to search and organize multiple types of content, including video, photos, voice, and text. These solutions work with even the most complex data and IT architectures —and can orchestrate processes across every critical business system. With a cloud foundation, the possibilities are for scale are endless (small or large).
5. Consistency and accuracy – Worry less about errors and be confident the first time
Humans make mistakes — it is in our nature — but RPA solutions do not. In addition to saving time and resources, automation can help establish a workflow that keeps deadlines on track, reducing the chance for miscommunication or inconsistencies. Additionally, with business logic and error checking embedded in the solutions, you can rest easy with essentially 100% accuracy across your most important business processes.
Bottom Line
Digital operations is just beginning to transform how businesses run. As it spreads across every industry, we’ve seen it applied across practically every application imaginable. The Spur Group advises clients on how build their digital operations strategy and helps implement this emerging technology. To learn more about how we can help, connect with a member of our team today.
