If we look at the statistics, we will see that only 31% of businesses have fully automated at least one function, according to McKinsey. However, 66% of businesses are piloting business process automation solutions in 2020.

Agreed, 66% is quite a huge figure, but not big enough to bring all enterprises pan industries under the umbrella of automation.

Even though IT solutions providers like Accenture confirmed that AI technology could increase business productivity by 40%, most enterprises are hesitant to upgrade themselves. There are specific challenges that deter a full-scale adoption of business process automation. A few obvious reasons can be attributed to lacking a clear strategy for AI as cited by 43% of organizations and a lack of technological infrastructure, according to 25% of others.

Hence, anticipating the challenges before implementing automation and identifying clear remedies can spare enterprises a few hundred billion dollars or more in losses.

Below are three critical challenges of business process automation that need serious consideration before implementation –

Challenge 1: The Skill Crisis

Not every single employee in an organization is well-versed with the technical nitty-gritties. That enforces pressure on enterprises that have adopted automation in some form or the other. Yes, automation simplifies the workload for companies. But it is not replacing human intelligence altogether. Resilient businesses and their employees have evolved alongside technological advancements – history says it all. However, not all are fit to understand the tech jargon. To accommodate business process automation, ventures need skilled employees. Now, that is hard to come by. Experts predict that at least 30% of global IT jobs will lie vacant by 2022 due to a lack of skilled workers with sound knowledge of automation, AI, and other emerging technologies. Hence, the first step towards automation for businesses is identifying this gap and looking for ways to fill it effectively.

Challenge 2: Apprehensive Mindset

According to experts, 45% of decision-makers are apprehensive about trusting AI and automation. Such apprehension stems from the common fear of automation replacing humans altogether, notwithstanding the fact that humans and machines might not fit well to drive meaningful business outcomes.

This mindset is quite like the mindset projected by drivers who are apprehensive of autonomous cars, letting go of the wheel and ceding control to their automated vehicles. This is where the lapse exists. Business process automation doesn’t imply letting go of complete control over the business. Instead, automation is coded to assist its creator.

Hence, business leaders have to step up and address company-wide uncertainty to witness a successful business process automation implementation. They have to educate the employees on the varying benefits of automation before implementing one.

Challenge 3: Mismanagement of Technology Overload

Technology adoption is not slowing down. Automating a few business processes is probably the baby step taken towards it. Unfortunately, the IT teams are stretched thin with a huge  number of roles falling on their plate simultaneously. They are constantly tasked with managing cybersecurity and connectivity, handling multiple data quality projects, reconciling new and legacy technologies, integrating thousands of disconnected systems and devices across the enterprise. Yes, automation can prove to be a godsend for work overload for IT professionals only if it is implemented properly. Otherwise, if implemented incorrectly, business process automation will only create unnecessary headaches, not to mention the amount of extra work added to IT teams’ KRA.

Remedies for Business Process Automation Challenges

Now, the issues are quite challenging but not impossible to handle. Anticipating them beforehand can save businesses many troubles. However, there are a few precautionary measures that companies can resort to before implementing automation. That’s because a few business process automation challenges, like the ones mentioned above, are one-size-fits-all.

Let’s delve deeper into understanding them –

Remedy 1: Prioritize Upskilling & Training

Opting for hiring new experts might seem a logical decision. But, that will only add to your recruitment budget. Instead, make do with your existing workforce. The latter has the vantage point in that they can understand how existing technology and new automation approaches fit well together. They are already equipped with the existing technology and well-versed in how your business runs. All you need to do is spend hours upskilling them. A few hours of training can easily bring your existing team on board with the new software, automation, and analytical tools. That’ll indirectly contribute to expanding your existing teams’ capabilities and enriching their professional development.

Remedy 2: Identify Areas for Automation

Different business units have different requirements. Hence, the type of automation tools will differ from the other. There’s no rulebook or one-size-fits-all strategy here that enterprises can uniformly follow. So, the next best bet for companies would be to identify the areas that urgently need automation. Evaluate the best approach for each use case and identify the ripe areas for automation. Post that, start implementing to gain insights on how things function. Do not expect to taste success in the first trial. And, it’s totally fine to fail multiple times. That’ll award you with enough clarity as to why the project didn’t work, the challenges faced, and what next can be done to avert the next failure. Such inputs are crucial to evaluating and pinpointing areas of concern and easing business process automation. Automation is a journey, and every organization has a different path to follow – so move at your own pace.

Remedy 3: Start Small; Grow Big Later

The reason why most enterprises are automating a few processes first before going on a full-scale business process automation. Instead of ceding full control to AI tools, companies should take an iterative approach to automation, starting with manual administrative tasks that consume more human work hours. Once your teams are comfortable with the new software, you can ramp up the implementation process to larger workflows. Any challenges perceived at the initial stages will be easily taken care of before handling more critical automation tasks. This approach will cater to a seamless adoption of automation without disrupting operations of other core areas.

Remedy 4: Choose an Open Ecosystem

Always be wary of vendor lock-in. Open ecosystem, standards-based and multi-vendor solutions are the most favoured approaches to business automation. That way, you can deploy the best products and services that align with your unique business needs, thereby awarding you with the flexibility to adapt to changing requirements.

Remedy 5: Unsure about Automation; Outsource

No one is putting a gun against your forehead and forcing you to upskill your team, even when they are not skilled enough to run automated, AI-powered software. There’s always a second-best option for you – outsourcing. Outsourcing the management of automation projects will give enough time bandwidth to your existing employees to learn about the software at their own pace. Also, pooling the entire team to training might disrupt other business operations because you are too desperate to get everyone on board with the software as fast as possible. This approach is wrong and can prove damaging to your business, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars in loss you might have to face due to multiple-system failure. Hence, managing such intricated software is best left with experts. As the third party does the implementation and managing tasks on your behalf, you can easily continue upgrading your day-to-day operations and seeking new talents who are comfortable handling such software.

Conclusion

Just like Rome was not built in a day, business process automation implementation takes time. Transforming an entire system to automation is not devoid of foreseen and unforeseen challenges. Hence, it is entirely up to business leaders how they perceive the change, anticipate automation challenges and take appropriate measures to counter them.

Automation is an antidote to clogged business processes relying on traditional approaches. Business process automation is the key to removing the roadblocks and pushing enterprises to their road to success, only when implemented carefully. Hence, anticipating the challenges aforehand and finding a fitting solution for remediation can guarantee success.

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Cloud adoption trends have been ongoing with full force since 2020. But, to facilitate the rapid transformation, enterprises needed a more holistic approach to strategy-building to accommodate enterprise-wide migration to the cloud. And that entails keeping a watchful eye on emerging cloud adoption trends in the market.

It’s true, cloud computing boomed in 2020, but a full-scale shift to the cloud is still an ongoing practice as enterprises are exploring ways to accommodate the transition. As more and more companies come under the cloud umbrella, global spending on cloud services will increase, touching the figure of $1 Trillion by 2024, as per experts.

But, there’s no end to what technology can do and how it can surprise us. Hence, businesses must stay abreast of cloud computing trends to stay ahead in the market.

Below are a few that are likely to make a major impact on businesses adopting cloud platform as a service –

 1. Robust Cloud Security

Security should be the top-most priority to consider when we speak about cloud services. Recent cloud security trends show that even the most secured cloud platforms like AWS are vulnerable to cyber thefts. Meaning, user data is not safe, as was perceived earlier. The 2019 Capital One breach impacting over 100 million customers show that AWS was vulnerable to server-side request forgery attacks. Hence, a cloud platform as a service is not 100% safe and secure. But, that doesn’t mean cloud servers can’t be fortified. This rising concern has shaped Secure Access Service Edge and Cloud-based disaster recovery practices.

Remote working allows employees to access more company data from personal devices outside their organizations’ IT networks. That leaves company data vulnerable to plausible cyber theft. Hence, businesses should reconsider before providing access to their cloud services to employees and other concerned parties. On the other hand, recovery practices maintain a backup of company data on an external server. Businesses frequently resort to cloud-based disaster recovery for critical servers and applications like huge databases and ERP systems.

Nevertheless, the hunt should continue to build robust and fortified cloud storage for businesses to counter the intelligent cyber miscreants.

2. Cloud Services are More Intelligent

The need of the hour – cloud services has evolved more than just a platform for data storage. High-end technology is implemented to extract insights from the available data stored in the cloud. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence boost cloud services efficiency with best automation practices.

Automation is the key driver of cloud adoption. Companies looking for ways to automate many internal procedures can do so by shifting their data and processes to a centralized cloud storage system. Many are already expanding their cloud footprints by fostering a seamless flow of data between diverse suppliers on the cloud.

Also, cloud computing plays a critical role in delivering AI services. Machine Learning platforms require huge processing power and enough data to process, with huge cloud datacenters to make data available to anyone. Many everyday AI use cases that we see, right from Google Search to Insta filters, lives in the cloud, and technology routing traffic data centres to our devices is built on Machine Learning. Generative machine learning creating anything from art to training more and language modelling require cloud computing to deliver these services to users and build the infrastructure to deliver them.

Hence, a cloud platform as a service will no longer restrict itself to storing user data. It is deemed for something greater.

3. Blurring Differences between Private and Public Cloud

Private cloud is needed for regulatory and security reasons. But, initially, companies moving into the cloud had two options to select – Private cloud and Public cloud.

Today, big tech giants like Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon are rolling out a hybrid cloud platform as a service to give users a taste of both worlds. Now, it is entirely up to the users how they use this hybrid model. Theoretically speaking, public cloud space is good enough to store data that customers need quick and frequent access. On the other hand, private cloud services are harnessed to store more sensitive data to monitor and process access. This hybrid approach reduces the complexity for companies who initially found themselves amidst a multi-cloud environment, using cloud services from several suppliers.

4. Serverless Experience

Cloud service providers have developed serverless models to counter many cloud teething troubles like speed, cost control, and server management. To deploy a cloud platform as a service, the typical practice was to write a code, provision a physical server or virtual machine, and prep that environment before running the code. There were serious problems with this old, and expenses added up because the code runs continuously.

Contrarily, a serverless cloud allows developers to encapsulate all that code and, when triggered, execute it automatically. Developers can deploy and scale cloud services rapidly, minus more servers. Moreover, businesses can access IT infrastructure on demand without investing in infrastructure or managing it. Hence, companies can use higher computing power without paying the adjacent high price and easily launch new digital services without burdening their already overburdened IT personnel.

5. Controlled Cloud Costs

It’s true, cloud services reduce data storage and computing costs, but overspending is possible if usage isn’t managed properly. Data, analytics, and AI can help businesses identify where, when, and how costs are occurring and how they can be optimized. Moreover, these insights help businesses continuously control and cut costs wherever possible.

However, the whole picture can only be realized if business leaders pay more than a casual interest in finding the right tool or partner for the right job.

In 2022, we expect more businesses to show proactiveness in controlling cloud services’ costs.

6. Sustainability is Driving Cloud Innovation

Approaching sustainability business practices puts industries pan world under pressure to approach environment-friendly practices. Cloud computing has also fallen under the same radar. Even though services run on the cloud, powerful computing engines support those servers. Data centres running these servers consume substantial energy, which negatively impacts the environment. Hence, tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are investing heavily in green cloud computing to reduce their carbon footprints. Microsoft’s underwater datacenters are a strategic step towards it. And, many are shifting to sustainable energy sources to power these data centres. For example, Amazon has 206 sustainable energy projects running worldwide, generating around 8.5GW per year. It is also the world’s biggest buyer of renewable energy.

7. The Edge-Game

Edge computing is another terminology that has been gaining traction recently. Edge computing is a form of computing done on-site or near a data source. This minimizes the need for data processing from a remote data centre. It is supposed to improve response time.

The end goal is to bring data storage, processing and analytics close to the end-user for improved privacy, robust security, speed and efficiency. As per experts, by 2024, more cloud services will execute via edge computing or a cross between edge and hybrid. However, it remains to see how businesses embrace the new trend in 2022 and later.

8. A boom in Cloud Gaming

The gaming industry has spiralled, especially during the covid pandemic. But, many things are happening in the gaming realm. For instance, cloud-based mobile platforms are sprouting up to give users a seamless gaming experience at no cost and zero downloading on the cloud itself. Moreover, Cloud Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality has contributed to bringing down the prices of headsets, making them more affordable than earlier. Platforms like Google’s Stadia and Amazon’s Luna are already redefining the cloud gaming realm. A cloud gaming platform as a service will be a thing to consider in 2022.

Conclusion

It’s true, cloud platform as a service has evolved and gone beyond a mere data storage box. The advent of new technologies has contributed to its massive transformation in recent years. As more enterprises shift their businesses to the cloud, more innovative tech-driven trends are likely to follow. We are standing at the crux of the cloud computing revolution, with the trends mentioned above are just the building blocks for a bright future. Rest, it all depends on how businesses perceive the trends and leverage the benefits of cloud services trends in the coming days.

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Present-day customers are whimsical, and they behave in a certain way that often baffles marketers and businesses. So, winning them via top-notch buying experience is a battle strategy for businesses and owning a band of loyal buyers is the trophy.

However, the inability to foresee buyers’ journeys can prove costly for companies. That’s because the latter is spending billions of dollars on market acquisition. Even then, when customers fail to take the expected call-to-action from the webpage, all the efforts put behind pushing customers to that point get flushed down the gutter.

Providing a spot-on customer experience, which is nothing short of a battlefield to win against competitors, come much later. After all, the journey begins much earlier than that – starting right from where your customers first checked in to your website.

How do customers interact with your brand? Or why do customers behave the way they do while interacting with your web pages? – These are important questions that can seriously make or break the game for your business. And, companies wouldn’t mind spending dollars on finding the answers. Well! If not dollars, what companies can at the max do or are doing already is – mapping the customer journey.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

In simple words, customer journey mapping refers to the path a customer follows through when interacting with your brand and all the actions the former takes along the path. This serves as a roadmap for businesses to follow, retracing the steps taken by their prospects and understanding business from a buyer’s perspective. Sounds simple? It is, actually.

A simple example to elucidate the point here – consider yourself running an eCommerce portal selling beauty products to the female target market. How would you understand whether your services align with your customers’ whims or not? Try to step into their shoes and wear your customers’ hats for a day. This exercise can open your eyes to various breakpoints that your customers are probably experiencing while interacting with your page. However, this simple exercise is not feasible when you handle more buyers at a time.

So, what should be your next best bet? First, have a proper customer journey mapping strategy in place.

Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Needless to say, customer journey mapping has its own set of perks and benefits. First, identifying customer touchpoints and addressing their pain points go a long way to maintaining a band of loyal buyers. The latter then works as a silent marketing channel for you, bringing more buyers on board through word-of-mouth. So, ignoring this part will be the worst decision in the history of bad decisions.

Hence, without much ado, let’s understand the benefits in brief

• Target your customers more accurately

It is important to have a flair idea of who your customers are and their expectations. And also gaining a clear vision of their journey to help you build customer personas accurately. A good image of your potential buyers will help you target them with a high degree of precision.

• Shift your focus on inbound marketing

Inbound marketing refers to creating content useful to your target audience. With the help of blogs, articles, and other forms of content, you can establish yourself as the knowledge leader in that niche. Once you capture their attention, they want to keep coming back to you for more knowledge. Converting them into ultimate buyers becomes easy than the traditional marketing approaches. Hence, mapping your customers or leads will help you easily grasp what interests the former and what drives them away from your site. Work on these areas more to capture more leads.

• Be more proactive about customer service

Customer experience happens all along their journey. So, proper mapping can help your business to strategize accordingly. This allows you to take care of your customers at every stage of their interaction with your business.

• Identify areas to focus more on

Customer journey mapping also helps you identify areas that leave your customers unsatisfied. Mapping several customers’ journeys and pinpointing common areas of concern will drive your concentrated efforts there and improve them accordingly to fill those gaps.

• Improve customer retention rate

Mapping your customer journey pinpoint contributing factors of customer churning earlier on. That leaves you with enough bandwidth to re-engage customers before they leave and retain them for a longer duration.

Understanding the Role of AI in Customer Mapping

Obviously, there are various tools to conduct your customer journey mapping – Google and Adobe Analytics being two of them. However, digital journey maps powered by AI and Machine Learning capabilities supersede traditional mapping tools in fetching accurate results. They pinpoint every digital interaction and event occurring during a buyer’s digital journey and why. These reliable real-time data help businesses identify what is preventing buyers’ forward progress faster than traditional mapping tools.

Today, these digital journey maps are about living, breathing information that companies need to capture in real-time and analyze accurately. An effective digital journey map of a customer pays off in more ways than one – right from fetching higher ROI on marketing, lowering customer service costs, higher cross-selling or upselling rates to more positive social media mentions, among other benefits mentioned above.

Incorporating the power of AI at every point in the customer journey improves businesses’ customer services and enhances customer experience manifold. Surveys show 32% of major companies pan world are already using AI customer service technologies.

But, as we mentioned earlier, customer experience comes much later. Hence, companies should invest heavily in AI tools to fetch improved results from where your customers first landed on your web page.

How to Discover Customer Touchpoints using AI

Now, there are various touchpoints in a customer’s entire buying journey. Identifying these touchpoints at various stages before, during, and after purchase is vital to delivering a greater experience across all touchpoints. This helps businesses meet customer expectations throughout their journey.

But, using a traditional approach for the same leaves enough room for errors. This is where AI and ML can make some real difference. Let’s dive deeper –

1. AI Helps with More Accurate Decisions

Traditional approaches involve humans and a tad amount of guesswork. Most prefer to rely on their intuitions. But these intuitions or guesswork are shrouded in errors because humans are prone to making biased judgements. That will never paint an accurate picture. On the other hand, an AI-driven approach keeps these biased judgements and guesswork out of the equation and provide real-time facts and figures. Using such real data can help businesses make accurate decisions.

2. Pinpointing Customer Intent & Pain Points Better

Analyzing billions of customer data points across myriad owned and third-party channels is no child’s play. But, capturing them in real-time helps businesses identify buying patterns, preferences, gaps, and customer pain points. Also, these data shed light on the likelihood of conversions. For example, evaluating the recency and frequency of customer activities online pinpoint customer habits and preferences. Such information is valuable to address buyers’ needs and grievances in real-time at every step of their journey. Using AI-powered tools like deep learning can make this cumbersome task simple and fast. You cannot afford to falter in your steps at any given point because that will cost you a valuable lead.

3. Personalize Market & Product Recommendations

Here, AI leverage captured data to aid businesses better understand their end-buyers behaviour and interests during their entire journey. Again, such information is vital to tailoring marketing activities or sharing product recommendations that align with buyers’ needs. In addition, creating bespoke content on an individual level is likely to generate a higher level of customer engagement even while the buyer is still travelling through the website. Only AI-powered tools can help companies to lay hands on such crucial information faster and in real-time to provide the same services at the exact time when customers need them.

4. Optimizing Best Timings for Engagement

As mentioned earlier, engaging customers in real-time can increase the effectiveness of your marketing and promotional efforts alongside boosting conversions. Unlike humans, AI will only redirect its efforts to those customers who are most likely to convert. But, if you use a human brain to guess when should you send a friendly reminder to the buyer whose chosen items are lying on the cart untouched, you are either turning off the buyer with a hasty approach or driving them away for a prolonged wait. Contrary to that, an AI tool will figure out the optimum time by analyzing historical behavioural data in real-time.

 5. Continuous Testing & Improving Efforts

Today customer behavior is changing at lightning speed. Top it up with ‘n’ number of options available in the market; buyers will hesitate a little before switching their brands. Hence, it becomes imperative for businesses to continuously keep a tab of these changes and adapt them accordingly. Here, the beauty of using Ai-optimized models lies in the fact that they are constantly learning and refining their data-collecting strategies to offer more accurate results at lightning speed.

Hence, your customer journey mapping, including the touchpoints, become a reliable source for an improved customer experience.

6. Creating a Seamless Customer Experience

All of the efforts mentioned above boil down to rendering seamless customer experiences, which gives a competitive edge to businesses in the market. Companies can never go wrong with their efforts if they wish to survive and win the rat race. But, offering an improved customer experience is not easy. A few factors should be considered, one of them being knowing customers preferred channels for different actions. For example, a customer might use a laptop to conduct research but a mobile phone to complete the purchase. Hence, their interactions on either device should be equally seamless and hurdle-free. Else, you can kiss your prospects goodbye. As a business owner, it falls in your KRA to ensure your customer-centric approach should work fluidly together across channels and serve them exactly where they are and where they need. Who do you think locate a customer’s presence in which device real-time and for what reasons? This task is humanely not possible, especially when you have to map multiple buyers’ journeys at a time. Only an AI tool holds the potential to tackle such challenges single-handedly and helps you to deliver a spot-on customer experience.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and others falling under the broader spectrum of AI have proved their capabilities time and again. Leveraging them to improve your business, especially your buyers’ journey, keeps you ahead in the competitive curve. Your strategies can never falter in serving your customers better than your competitors. The reason being, the customer is always king. Hence, automation and AI can save your day, unburden your pain, and make buyers’ journeys spectacular.

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Considering that cyber-attacks have nearly tripled or more in the recent past makes Ignorance a Bliss no more! Cybersecurity forces had predicted one attack every 11 seconds in 2021. The world had barely made it into the third month of the year, and there had been a 20M breached records noted in March 2021. Researches show that more than 2,200 cyberattack incidents were recorded daily in the same year.

Today, as we stand at the crux of a new year, we wonder what more is left to see. The answer to this will be – A Hell of a Lot More! Reasons being, a mass-scale adoption of digital platforms and shared-cloud space has only made the job easy for hackers and other cybercriminals. In an attempt to create a robust cloud infrastructure, pioneers have just handed the world on a silver plate to these online offenders. Even though modern technology promises 100% safety and security of consumer data, a fail-safe has been created, knowingly or unknowingly, for cyber attackers to do what they feel like. Surprisingly, the new-age technology could not build its arsenal against them. In fact, the world can expect more severe attacks to follow in the coming days, with compensation rising to $6 trillion by the end of 2021 or more moving forward.

Hence, the best bet for the world is to predict what kind of cyberattacks one can/should expect in 2022 and solidify their digital fortresses accordingly. If not, at least put aside trillions of dollars to compensate and mitigate the losses – whichever they deem fit.

Top Cyber-Attack Predictions for 2022

1. Disrupted Essential Medical Supplies

Only recently, the world has received the cruelest blows of Mother Nature. The covid-19 pandemic showed Men could no longer play God. But the cybercriminals are not done yet terrorizing innocent lives even at the cost of millions of deaths. According to James Carter, the chief security officer at LogRhythm predicted that “The supply chain of a major vaccine manufacturer will be halted by ransomware.” He believes, “In 2022, cybercriminals will set their sights on carrying out a ransomware attack against one of the pharmaceutical companies producing the Covid-19 vaccine. This will interrupt the production of critical booster shots and keep many other lifesaving drugs from reaching patients.” The outcome would be even more dramatic – it’ll surely ignite the flame for myriad vaccine disinformation campaigns.

2. Weaponized Malwares

So much for automation and artificially intelligent systems simplifying human lives. Little did mankind realize that someday their greatest find can turn into a Frankenstein. Yes, or so predicted by Chris O’ Ferrell, the chief threat officer of CodeHunter, who had nearly 35 years of experience working in the cybersecurity industry. According to him, “Extremely advanced, AI-driven, weaponized malware will emerge with the capability to circumvent most (if not all) of the defensive and detection security technologies used today.”

3. Reinforced Ransomware

The year 2021 has witnessed record-breaking ransomware payouts, one of them being a $40 million ransom paid by an insurance company. Such instances validate the ROI of ransomware and feed new ideas to wannabe cybercriminals.

And, the worst part is – ransomware has not seized to evolve yet. Experts believe that “in 2022, we’ll see more and more triple extortion ransomware, whereby a ransomware attack experienced by one business, becomes an extortion threat for its business partner. Ransomware attackers won’t stop extorting the victim organization for ransom; they will extort its business partners whose data it holds or business partners who cannot afford the supply chain disruption.”

Companies should take this as a warning and be prepared to face more personalized extortion threats arising from different assets, including IoT and company insiders.

4. Travel to Space & Beyond

The world is standing on the precipice of Space Tourism, and Elon Musk is pushing hard to add Space Travel to the list of Best Places to Visit. Unfortunately, that is already giving scamsters all kinds of scams and phishing ideas. When the world’s richest men are vying with each other to book a seat in a Space Rocket alongside Branson and Bezos, faux websites are cropping up across the Internet to sell you stars. They will promise all kinds of experience in exchange for a modest fee. This is a golden opportunity for these scamsters to harvest personally identifiable information for future use.

5. The Cloud is Under Siege

Taking your work to the cloud is the newest trend today. But the shared cloud space is more vulnerable than the engineers want us to think. Elephant-sized data is uploaded or shared in the cloud every day, including personal information to confidential business data and even confidential Government secrets. Already the year 2021 has witnessed an astronomical increase in cloud-space breaches. According to a recent survey, “more than 250 IT professionals, more than half of all businesses have experienced a security incident related to their cloud-based services.” Even top-notch high-profile businesses have been on the receiving end, one of them being, Alibaba Cloud, the biggest Asian cloud provider. Alibaba suffered a data breach of 1.1 billion records. But the worst news is still yet to come.

In early 2021, the misconfiguration of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service exposed the confidential information of more than a dozen companies. Unfortunately, the outcome can be more devastating. More than 90% of companies remain vulnerable to security breaches, courtesy to misconfigurations, especially remediating issues take more time. Small and medium-sized businesses take 75 days to resolve configuration issues post-discovery, whereas larger firms take 88 days or more.

Even Amazon’s AWS was not spared from the brunt of cybercriminals. In 2019, an attack on AWS user Capital One exposed the personal data of over 100 million users. And, quite recently, Amazon’s S3 cloud service exposed ten years’ worth of data for users belonging to Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Expedia, all thanks to misconfiguration.

So, you see, Cloud is no more a Safe Haven for Personal and Business Data.

6. Accelerated Cyber Crimes with 5G

A former White House employee has already predicted that the 5G network will accelerate cybercrime. Existing cybersecurity issues going unresolved can empower hackers to launch attacks on a massive scale. It won’t take a minute or two for these offenders to immobilize an entire smart city reliant on a 5G network. Most of the countries pan world are rolling out 5G connectivity. Unfortunately, these cities are digging their graves in the coming days.

7. AI – The New Arsenal for Attack

Former White House CIO Theresa Payton made another prediction alongside 5G scams. According to her, “AI will be cyber criminals’ weapon of choice. “And it’s going to continue to help them crack more and more accounts, networks and data stores.”

Remember the AI robots going rogue in the film I Robot? Well! Payton believes hackers can easily breach an AI system and alter its algorithms to manifest a behavior it was not originally designed to portray. That can be a real threat not only to individuals and companies but also to nations.

8. Remote Working is No More a Bliss

Post-pandemic many companies have shifted to the cloud allowing employees to work from remote locations. Some have even adopted a hybrid culture to accommodate the changing times. But remote setup can be a perfect spot for cybercriminals to hunt and kill. This changing workplace culture presents new-found opportunities for attackers who change their approach and re-entering the market with malware-as-a-service campaigns. They will hunt down essential tools used in the distributed workforce to launch their attacks. Virtual private networks and their providers with weak self-security postures or exposed servers will remain vulnerable to such thefts.

9. Cryptocurrency is the Next Best Bet

Recently, Check Point Research has investigated OpenSea to prove it is possible to steal users’ crypto wallets. Blockchain technology was supposed to safeguard the digital money of users. But little did the owners realize that even hackers are growing more knowledgeable than ever. With new technology coming into the mainstream, these miscreants are finding loopholes to weaponize and strengthen their arsenals against ignorant users. Hence, cryptocurrencies, which were once used to extort ransom money, could become the playground for these hackers.

10. Cyberwarfare aka WW3

Fear not – Nostradamus didn’t predict this, nor did Baba Vanga. But, given the rising tension between nations pan world, especially between US and China, a plausible third world war is not hard to predict. However, this war will not be fought with Guns and Men. Rather, the battlefield will be the Cyber Space and Ransomware or DDoS the weapons. China is notorious for cybercrimes, so also Russia, which knows how to leverage new technologies to manipulate and direct malware attempts. One attack on any nation’s essential services can immobilize all and sundry, making them vulnerable to any other form of attack.

Guess 2022 will not be a safe year to live!

Conclusion

Cybercrime can pose an existential risk – that much powerful these cyber-miscreants have become. Lisa Sotto, the head of the global privacy and cybersecurity practice at law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth, has warned businesses to stay alert. She said, “Every company, regardless of industry sector, will need to be laser-focused on strengthening their security measures. Boards of directors and C-suites alike have come to understand that the basic protections, such as multi-factor authentication, patching and access controls, are critical— and that cybercrime could pose an existential risk.”

The ten cyberattack predictions mentioned above for 2022 point towards plausible cyberwarfare. But, like Lisa said, that can be averted through tightened security measures and robust infrastructure. Then again, the Internet is vulnerable in nature, so is technology. Cybercriminals will find a way to play around the safety tools. What businesses and nations can do is continuously monitor and take timely measures continuously? And, don’t forget to learn from our past mistakes. Stay alert, stay guarded.

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Do you know how much energy each of these consume? To enlighten you, here’s a few hard facts to know –

• Data transmission centres consumed 1.4% of global electricity use in 2020.
• Power-hungry cryptocurrency mining accounts for 36 terawatt-hours in power consumption annually.
• 5G is also power-hungry. Experts presume 5G will prompt energy consumption to grow by 160% in 10 years.
• Cloud computing is not far behind. Bloomberg estimates cloud computing consumes 1% of world’s electricity.

And, trust us when we say, the last figure is poised to grow exponentially as more and more services shift to the cloud. The massive amount of data stored in cloud every day calls for more electricity support to power them, equivalent to 8%. And, they are dollar-hungry too! Studies show public cloud service providers spend more than a quarter of a trillion US dollars a year. Having nearly 90% of companies hosted on the cloud, this price seems quite reasonable. But cloud computing is not reasonable when it comes to power consumption, as we have seen earlier. To support massive amount of data stored in cloud every second, Amazon, Microsoft and Google maintain huge data centres pan world. And, these data centres consume an equally massive amount of power every day. In 2020, global data centres energy usage amounted to 200-250 TWh, equivalent to 1% of global electricity demand.

However, going back to pre-technology and industry era is out of question. So, the best way forward for humans is to find a more sustainable and greener solution to data storage in cloud. And, what can best fit the need of the hour other than Green Cloud.

What is Green Cloud Computing?

It goes without saying that cloud computing is quintessential to foster scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness for organisations – an irreplaceable need of the hour. However, facilitating oceans of data in the cloud comes with a heavy price. Data centres sprouting up everywhere to accommodate thousands of servers and other heavy equipment necessitating a fully operational cloud storage only adds to carbon footprints. Hence, a greener solution can remediate the present crisis, if not reverse it.

The term ‘green cloud computing’ was always there. But, only recently it has stepped in the forefront as the only solution to cater to rising demand for cloud computing minus its adverse effects.

Green cloud computing refers to designing, producing, and using digital spaces in a way that is both sustainable and environment-friendly. Green computing further enhances the efficiency of computing resources alongside reducing their energy consumption and the subsequent environmental impact of their increased usages.

The Information Communication Technology Industry is arguably the major defaulter in power consumption among others. Hence, it has become imperative for the world to find an energy efficient solution. Green computing is the answer.

Benefits of Green Computing

1. Reserve Energy for the Future

That’s the sole purpose of green computing – reserving energy for our children and grandchildren, and our planet as well. As per studies, a proposed Green Architecture for cloud computing can save energy consumption by 27% or more. Promoting recyclability and biodegradability of defunct products and factory waste reduces dependability on hazardous materials. That maximise the energy efficiency of centres manifold. Google funded a project not long ago to measure energy use and carbon footprints of the cloud. According to Google’s findings, organizations switching their common software programs to the cloud can cut down energy consumption by 87%. Adding to that, use of digital spaces to facilitate green cloud computing reduces technology’s impact on the environment and promote environment-friendly computer technologies that use power sustainably. More importantly, green cloud servers manage energy usage relentlessly and don’t get easily heated up. Further, pooling resources in the cloud allows companies to cut-down on the number of on-premise hardware resources, thereby minimising power consumption and reducing electricity bills.

2. Reduce Carbon Footprint Everywhere

Besides reserving energy for the future, green computing helps the environment in other ways. One of them being, flexibility to work from anywhere and anytime. Remote working became a big thing to consider post-pandemic. The world has already witnessed the benefits of permitting employees to work remotely. And, with an increase usage of cloud spaces, the need for employees to travel to work ends indefinitely. That not only cuts down on employee carbon footprint from traveling, it also reduces office footprint as well. However, there’s still time before remote working becomes a popular corporate culture. Still, many are opting for it and are successfully running companies from remote locations. A few others chose the Hybrid option, all courtesy to cloud computing.

3. Going Paperless

Storing and sharing important files and documents on the cloud reduce dependency on paperwork. And, with added back-up features, you won’t face the risk of losing data forever. That’s because they are safe and secure in the cloud. Varied cloud storage options like Google Drive, SharePoint, OneDrive, DropBox, and others, going paperless has never been easy. And, now, signing, sharing, and storing legal documents is easy, with just a few clicks of the mouse. So, companies can now bid recycling, shredding, incinerating, and disposing of paper documents a big Goodbye!

What’s New in Green Cloud?

A lot is happening in the green cloud space as Tech Giants like Microsoft and Google put their heads together to unearth more sustainable cloud computing solutions. The former has outlined an ambitious plan that is going to be a Gigantic Step towards sustainability. And, that being, Microsoft’s underwater data centres powered by renewable energy.

Microsoft has leveraged technology from submarines and marine energy to develop self-sufficient data centres underwater, designed to provide cloud services at lightning speed to coastal cities. Deployment of the Northern Isles datacentre at the European Marine Energy Centre marks a milestone in history. The pod’s cooling system will rely on ocean water, sustainably managing itself and operating without maintenance for five years.

Google, on the other hand, has racked up enough offset to zero out all emissions from its data centres. The company itself has achieved carbon neutrality long back by running on green power fully. Now, the Search Engine Guru is ambitiously planning to run all its data centres on 100% green energy round the clock.

Time To Go – GREEN!

Shifting to the cloud for data storage and sharing was anyway a baby step towards sustainability. But, finding greener solutions to compensate energy requirement of data centres supporting cloud storage was imperative given the present environmental condition. And, big companies like Microsoft and Google are already leading the battle from the front. Green cloud computing is a broader concept but going remote for work and paperless are few of the important measures taken towards it. And, switching to sustainable energy sources for cloud-support data centres is the best move forward. But the end line is still far and more sustainable measures towards green computing is needed to realise a complete green cloud computing – something akin to Microsoft’s underwater data centres.

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Needless to say, the world is moving at a faster pace, and competition is nothing short of a rat race. A minute of lapse, and you lost your game forever. That puts enterprises under tremendous pressure. They need to cater to changing customer needs right on time before their competitors remain ahead in the race. And there can be no room for errors or delays. But, relying heavily on the human workforce can never guarantee you the seamless workflow which has become the need of the hour.

Automation seems like the perfect answer to fit the needs of modern times. But making a dramatic transitional switch to automation is not devoid of challenges. One of them being, lack of prerequisite automation skills. In a recent survey, at least 50% of companies surveyed agreed that lack of automation skillsets deterred their enterprise automation adoption. The following two hindrances were – Technology Complexity and Lack of Budget. Approximately 42% of the respondents cited the first reason for not choosing automation, wherein 41% of them gave the second reason.

However, the same survey concluded that enterprise automation awarded them ”n” number of benefits. For example, 83% of respondents who already opted for automation in at least one of their business processes enjoyed improved efficiency and saved valuable time.

These figures are promising and call for serious consideration for companies to adopt automation as soon as possible. This article will give you enough reasons to elucidate the above point.

Let’s begin with –

Understanding The Problem Areas Requiring Immediate Remediation

Identifying the critical areas in your enterprise that call for your immediate attention is shared across all businesses. Traditionally, the human workforce was the key to catering tasks and solving operational problems. But was your resource competent enough to keep up with increasing demand? Kindly note, we are not undermining the value of the human workforce at all. Instead, we are trying to point out that there’s so much a human can do, or their brain can process at any given point in time. Expecting them to deliver responsibilities at lightning speed would be wrong. But the competitive market demands speed and accuracy. Handling ”n” number of clients, improving products and services to changing market demand, addressing ”n” number of customer queries in real-time and making data-driven decisions can be pretty taxing. On a granular level, these responsibilities might not sound humongous. But as your company expands into other verticals and the internal processes become more complicated, handling all these jobs becomes a back-breaking task. Yes, humans are capable of multitasking. Then again, humans are prone to making errors. One teeny tiny mistake and the entire process can fall apart. You need more helping hands to identify and solve the issue at hand. That can easily disrupt other operations. Not to mention the valuable time lost in-between.

So, the stories are familiar for every enterprise – every area has common pain points, and they revolve around outdated, time-consuming processes, including several human touchpoints. Hence, streamlining the whole system becomes imperative today. And, the answer to that is – automation.

This is an overview of the common problems most enterprises currently face, especially those who stay away from automation. Hence, big brains must come together and pinpoint problem areas and look for automated solutions. And, the first area of concern would be –

1. Costly Human Errors

As mentioned earlier, to err is human. That goes beyond missing deadlines and losing important files. Unfortunately, the outcome of such errors can become your company’s worst nightmare. The cost of rectifications can reach the sky, but the lost client due to the error will be irreplaceable. But, traditional methods of business entailed manual labor using human hands. Even coming to crucial business decisions required two or more human brains to mining data and fetch information. Handling piles of files or sorting through excel sheets of data sounds quite overwhelming. Forget about timely delivery – consider that one error in data analysis can cost the company billions of dollars in loss. One wrong piece of information results in many bad business decisions. And, before you have the time to rectify the errors, your business opportunity is long gone.

Is there any need to elucidate further how damaging it could be for your business when you rely heavily on the human workforce?

On the other hand, an automated system will be programmed so that every process will be completed on time minus errors. Replacing humans with automation makes business processes smoother and faster. That increases the overall productivity and efficiency of the company. And, it is usually less expensive compared to keeping three or more human resources for the same process. Also, no error rectification charges to consider.

2. Valuable Time Lost In Manual Tasks

Documentation, compilation and reporting sound pretty laborious – isn’t it? If your company is still dwelling in the ”Paper-Age”, you are wasting valuable time documenting and compiling bundles of data. And valuable time lost in actual work – data mining and analyzing. When you need specific data to make a crucial business decision, your deadline will be long gone in collating data and analyzing them. Also, these manual tasks reserve one or more human resources permanently. Not only are you eating away their valuable time, but you are also restricting their professional growth. When you can efficiently utilize them for something better, you make them work like manual laborers. And, obviously, there are costly human errors to consider.

Time to wake up and bring some profound changes in your organizational structure. You can start by automating these manual tasks and rid your employees of this unnecessary animal burden. Allow them the time and space to grow professionally and contribute better to your business apart from data filing.

Bring automation into the scene and witness the change. Your documentation and data filing will be done in no time, minus errors. And, when you need to refer back to specific files, you can have them with just a click of the button.

3. Poor Customer Service

If you are in the service sector, you should know that poor customer service can be highly costly for your business. Even if your business is focused on product development, the untimely address of customer inquiries can spread a bad word for your company.

Today, the entire world is connected digitally. Garnering a poor online reputation for your company can break your business forever. It doesn’t take a second for the word to spread on social media, and soon, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram will be busy talking about how poor your services are. So, undermining customer needs is the worst thing you can do for your business.

Customer is the king – always remember! But human customer executives cannot cater to thousands of customer inquiries at a time. Most of them are piled up with manual paperwork, so prompt and timely delivery of services becomes a luxury for them. On the other hand, most human executives lack the required knowledge or information to address customer queries in any shape and form. Needless to say, most customers are left pissed with such a display of inadequacy on customer executives. Without even realizing it, you are pushing them away from your business. Do you think your company can survive longer post this?

Hence, you need to gear up and bring profound change to your enterprise by automating the customer service section. Integrating business automation software into the existing interface can serve as an extra hand for the customer care executives. Automated calls and email options or auto-responses to general inquiries unburden the executives and allow them to handle more sensitive cases. Timely response to bulk customer queries gets sorted with an automated process, and customers are left with a big smile on their faces. Even if an executive forgets to inform a customer about delivery or pick up, the automated system will do that for them.

So, no more excuses of lapses or system glitch for poor service.

4. Security Issues

There are security risks associated with manual or outdated processes. Especially when most ventures have opted for remote working or hybrid working, security issues regarding sensitive company information have raised alarm bells. Manual processes with multiple human touchpoints also add additional risks such as communication breakdown and data loss. Furthermore, data sharing via shared or public networks remains vulnerable to cyber thefts. Hence, a robust and secured infrastructure has become the need of the hour. An automated system can warranty that safety and security -how? Let’s elucidate further – enabling automation cut down human touchpoints and ward off any risk of human error or sensitive data falling into the wrong hands. An automated system ensures data and documents to be shared with only designated employees. Moreover, your client and customer data remain secure, and only those people whom the company assigns can see that information. It will not be open for access by all and sundry.

5. Poor Decision-Making

Again, as mentioned earlier, managing multiple clients and projects consume valuable time. And, every single client project involves numerous stages, documenting being one of them. Relying on the human workforce means you employ at least one human head dedicated to filing, recording, and compiling client data. But you are dealing with just one client, right? Even small ventures handle two or more clients’ projects simultaneously. Then again, essential processes like collating company analytics, driving current client growth or prospecting new clients do not attract your immediate attention. The reason being, you are more preoccupied with delivering current clients’ projects and catering to their demands. These old-school approaches to business can easily divert your mind away from revenue-generating operations. Also, coming to data-driven decisions will become a challenge when you have to rely on human brains again to fetch data.

What if all these data were readily available just when you needed them? Report automation technology can help you with that without disrupting other workflows. You don’t need to shift two or more employees from their KRAs to collate data for you because you need them instantly to make some decisions. Just log in to the system, and you have everything sorted the way you need. Data collected in real-time with fewer human touchpoints will fetch accurate and relevant results. Hence, decision-making will become more prompt, data-driven, and effective.

6. Poor Maintenance Of Financial Reports

This is yet another area where relying on the human workforce can spell disaster for businesses in the long run. Proper maintenance of invoices and financial reports of the company is an arduous task. But, when you have piles of invoices to document and file, coming from clients, suppliers and distributors, the situation can go out of hand completely. And, one mistake in inputting any figures can reflect wrongly on the annual reports. That will have dire implications for strategy building, budget allocating, and decision-making. Automated systems like SAP can address these challenges quickly and make the entire process seamless and errorless. More importantly, you will get an accurate picture of where your business stands at the end of the Financial Year.

7. Hindrance In Business Growth

You have a proper vision plan in place when you launch your business. And, that is – business growth. However, a rapid growth rate will only add to the number of tasks and complexities. Unavailability of resources and inefficient staff can add to your never-ending worries. More importantly, if you are still accustomed to the historical approach to operating your business, you are likely to always stay behind in the competitive curve. Only proper business process automation can maximize your growth rate minus hindrances and improve your operational efficiency. When you automate most of the laborious processes, you leave yourself enough bandwidth to focus on more critical tasks like R&D. Even your workforce can contribute better to your business than just filing documents.

Conclusion

If you take an eagle-eye view of your company, you will find many processes that can be best handled with automation. The seven points are just the tip of the iceberg to open your eyes to the many benefits of an automated business process. There are other perks to enjoy. And, it has become imperative for companies to adapt to the changing technology to stay ahead in the market. Here, a manual or old-school approach will not help your enterprise ride the tides safely.

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The overall delinquencies on industrial and personal loans have increased to reach a serious level. The COVID-19 crisis is going to change the way people think about debt and new mortgages because of its consequences of unemployment, loss of revenue, cautious spending habits, and a fall in disposable income.

Even governments across the globe are providing relief packages to individuals and business borrowers to help them sail through this crisis. As a result, lending institutions have been constrained to offer temporary postponements of loan payments and other modifications. This all is going to have a direct impact on banks, credit unions, and financial institutions on how and how much they can collect from debtors.

However, AI-based debt recovery can help you maintain cash flow, improve the flow of incoming revenue and reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO). Therefore, finance leaders are looking to foster business resiliency through agile technologies such as artificial intelligence and RPA to manage credit risks.

Artificial Intelligence Delivering Business Resilience to Banks and Financial Institutions

The contribution of AI in business resiliency can be traced in three major areas, amongst others: cash flow, coworker safety, and wellness, and customer retention. Businesses can remain resilient by accommodating AI and intelligent automation in these areas.

1.Cash Flow:

The foremost priority of the financial leaders is to make informed decisions on cash flow while ensuring all the stakeholder relationships are kept intact. Financial organizations would require a close analysis of processes that impact receivables to overcome leakages and bottlenecks. With the use of AI in business, financial leaders can discover and analyze these processes to forecast quickly and minimize revenue loss.

2.Coworker Safety and Wellness:

In the initial days of lockdown across geographies, managers at all levels wanted to know their coworkers’ health situations and where they were. This is because employees’ wellness is tied to their workloads and the reduction in resources because of lockdown may overwhelm the remaining staff with spiking workloads. Here, if the bank is struggling with unmanageable stacks of financial paperwork and back-office operations, the bank can leverage artificial intelligence solutions to process this backlog of documents with improved accuracy.

3.Customer Retention:

Every brand needs to stay close to its customers to retain them. Most financial services consumers expect omnichannel banking experience and personalized financial advice. AI-driven customer retention strategies can help here by ensuring timely and appropriate responses. Artificial intelligence solutions can pull off such efficient customer engagement through customer service automation, customer insights, etc.

Debt Collection with AI for Improving Receivable Management

Lenders can use artificial intelligence in various ways to collect debt effectively. With the use of intelligent debt collection solutions, lenders will not only be able to identify and manage credit risks but will also reap rewards like higher collection liquidation rates and reduced cost of collection. AI-driven debt collection can help financial institutions with customer-centric debt collection, regulatory compliance, and customized insight-led solutions, all of which are key to successful receivable management.

Here Are The Top Three Ways You Can Use AI In Debt Collections:

1. Using real-time, high-velocity data for better collection rates: Generating insights across customer’s journeys is a key to identify trends, anomalies, and opportunities. Traditional debt collection tactics used to rely on human instincts. Here, we will rather use siloed data sets and logical sequential data to develop insight-led solutions.
   Advanced AI/ML analytics will translate some insights into actions such as identifying early potential defaulters using predictive modeling, notifying collectors to check on at-risk debtors proactively and provide credit counseling support, and restructuring payment plans.
2. Using behavioral science to personalize customer experience: Debt collection strategies can be modified using insights based on customer’s demographic and socio-economic data, salary, occupation, and historical interactions. This will ensure the right channel and follow-up actions where you will probably get a positive response.
3. Enhanced customer experience: Artificial intelligence solutions with automation bots can carry out smart dialogues between businesses and customers via email, SMS, or any social media platform. This will enable collectors to reach exactly where the customer logs in several times a day and can pay the outstanding debt online, resulting in faster delivery of receivables.

Benefits of Intelligent Debt Collections

AI makes debt collection more efficient and a customer-centric process, which leads to several benefits that include:

• Improved communication
• Streamlined processes
• A better understanding of customers
• Optimized debt collection strategies
• Better pay-back rates
• Fewer insolvencies
• Automated communication

Conclusion

AI is a powerful debt collection tool that can turn your debt collection resolution into a user-friendly journey. Even better, by implementing AI, you will set the stage for enhanced business intelligence and borrower analytics, providing a 360° view of the customers you are lending to.

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It seems like yesterday when there were countless debates about whether automation was designed to aid the human workforce or render them jobless. Even before we could come to a concrete conclusion regarding the impact of automation on the organization’s future, we already have a new terminology in the market known as hyperautomation. Let us now understand what is hyperautomation.

Definition Of Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation is a combination of different technologies to undertake end-to-end automation of an organization’s processes under a unified and intelligent system. Hyperautomation is an application of a mix of technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent business process management (IBPM) and artificial intelligence to streamline the various tasks performed by the organization. The term hyperautomation was first coined by research engine Gartner, which identified hyperautomation as one of the top 10 trends of 2020 and also predicted that adopting hyperautomation technologies will reduce as much as 69% of the manager’s workload by 2024.

Hyperautomation Technologies

Having discussed what hyperautomation means, let us now look at various hyperautomation technologies. Although it uses a complementary range of technologies, the two key components of hyperautomation are Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Intelligent Business Process Management (IBPM).

1. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA is the use of computer software to reproduce tasks that are repetitive and follow a specific pattern, such as data entry and payment reconciliation. With RPA, it becomes easier to capture data and manipulate apps as humans would do. The use of RPA is limited to single tasks or quick processes that follow a pre-defined pattern which aids in reducing human intervention.

2. Intelligent Business Process Management (IPBM)

IPBM combines Business Process Management (BPM) with complementary technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assist businesses in dynamically automating end-to-end processes. IPBM allows for automation of a complete workflow, rather than focusing on a single task.

Besides the technologies mentioned above, hyperautomation also uses a host of other complementary technologies, the two most important being Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer or software to replicate complex human actions, such as decision-making and problem-solving, with no human interference. The core purpose of AI is to develop software or bots that can think just like humans or imitate humans.

Machine Learning is the application of AI that allows the software to autonomously learn and improve with no need for programming. AI uses learning algorithms to learn and improve from previous experiences.

Benefits Of Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation can rule the industrial world with the plethora of benefits that it offers. Some of the most significant benefits of hyperautomation are:-

1. Boost In Productivity

Implementation of hyperautomation technologies will help in boosting the productivity of an organization, resulting in better efficiency. The time that was spent on mundane tasks can now be used in implementing innovative plans and maintaining better customer relations.

2. Hassle-Free Integration

Hyperautomation simplifies data sharing across multiple apps, which facilitates smoother and quicker data access, allowing a hassle-free integration across the various components of the organization.

3. Reduction In Errors

The key to building a successful business lies in the ability of an organization to minimize errors and provide high-quality service to its clients. Hyperautomation can help a great deal in achieving this goal by identifying even the smallest of errors and correcting them, thus maintaining the quality of service.

4. Instant Insights

Hyperautomation provides real-time analysis of a situation, which proves instrumental in providing accurate insights. This helps in reducing risks and optimizing the performance with minimal time wastage.

5. Improved Customer Engagement

Hyperautomation will reduce the time spent on mundane tasks, and the time thus saved can conduct customer satisfaction surveys to understand the needs of the clients better. The feedback of the customers thus received can be used in providing better service to the clients in the future.

Conclusion

Keeping in mind the host of benefits that hyperautomation has to offer, it would not be far-fetched to assume that hyperautomation will soon become the need of every organization that plans to become a market leader in the future. For any organization looking to boost its productivity and efficiency without compromising on the quality of services that it offers, hyperautomation is the key. It is not the capacity to ideate, but the constant effort to innovate that will ensure the success of an organization in the long run.

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Why Is There A Need For Intelligent Automation, And How Are Companies Adapting?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) happens to be the foundational component of every intelligent technology and device in our possession. The tech is programmed in such a way that once it is coded and put into use; it learns new things by itself, forms new patterns, and then makes suggestions based on those patterns.

Take the consumer buying behavior, for example, wouldn’t it benefit a retail company or an e-commerce store to foresee their consumer purchases and make sure the things are in stock or, for a website, to suggest the right things to potential buyers? Yes, that’s AI at work. Always learning and adapting.

Companies are now identifying key processes and areas where they can add fixed and variable inputs into the information system and then make the decisions via automation systems. This helps to remove bottleneck, that otherwise would come in the way of streamlining processes at every level.

Different Sectors That Use Intelligent Automation Services Are

1. Healthcare

To save critical time and costs, Intelligent Automation solutions are now being used at hospitals. With the help of cognitive computing technology and practical inputs from doctors, nurses and technicians, it is now possible to provide faster and well-informed decisions about a patient that complies with healthcare policies and also keep in mind the past medical history of the patient. The results are futuristic and revolutionary.

2. Banking & Finance

Hedge fund companies now use intelligent process automation tools specially designed to review notes and go through a vast amount of data in a significantly lesser time. This helps with real-time decision-making backed by numbers and statistically calculated forecasts. Credit companies can now go through a million data points in a jiffy and evaluate a company, its assets and risks with the upside.

3. Tech

AI and Automation have changed the face of the technology sector. From stocking to ordering, forecasting and supplying, there is an Intelligent Automation process for nearly everything.

4. Public Sector

To eliminate potential threats, it is now possible to connect cameras, sensors and data feed and analyze them in real-time. London has a city-wide network of video cameras that help identify crime suspects.

5. Logistics & Supply Chain

This sector has gained the maximum benefit by adapting to automation. Given the high-volume, high-inventory and repetitive nature of the work, it benefits companies to use AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning), OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and RPA (Robotic Process Automation). Time-consuming and error-prone tasks are the ones that need to be automated on priority.

6. Telecom

The industry is at an age where it can distinctively take advantage of RPA to handle their high-volume data, endless tasks, and multiple management systems. Automating labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks is the priority for the industry today.

To identify what type of Intelligent Automation system would work well for your business, you need to identify key processes that can adapt to automation.

OPT For Process Automation

Does your company have a legacy system that takes a lot of time while onboarding new clients or sorting through the paperwork? Well, with the help of process automation you can balance the workload, auto-route the documents for approval, retrieve relevant information in real-time and also automate rule-based tasks.

Try Customer Communication Management

Email systems are so out-of-date. You need more than just basic filtering of incoming data to process it efficiently. A CCM system allows you to create and distribute personalized communication within the organization and also summarize, tag and categorize the content to be consumed. Intelligent automation services make it possible to share real-time communication with the right person via the right medium.

Making Bots Workforce Friendly

With Robotic Process Automation (RPA), it is now possible to have Bots as a part of your workforce. You free up your workforce for higher-value tasks, while the bots perform the repetitive and high-volume work regularly. Bots can run attended or unattended automation and deliver great results. Right from tracking logistics to answering FAQs – bots can ease up the process and free up time for other work.

Why Intelligent Automation Systems Are The Future?

Automation is inarguably the need of the hour. While focusing on the bigger picture that involves expansion and growth, a company must also have a vision for integrating Intelligent Automation systems with their current working systems seamlessly. The switch is to be gradual and be done from downwards to the top. Your employees need to be trained so that their interactions with the automation systems will be fruitful. An automation system adapts and learns from its environment, and hence the need for new automation-friendly work culture.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the future is already here. Intelligent Automation services are the answer. Are you ready to hitch along this ride and transcend the conventional performance trade-offs? If the answer is yes, as it should be, then companies such as Work Bot, Service Titan and (insert your company) are what you need to check out next!

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While the automation journey will soon become an imperative aspect of enterprise strategy, factors like quality, price, productivity, and agility will no longer be adequate to harness the potential of IA. The key to automation success lies in human-specific traits such as the ability to drive contextual creativity and empathy, complex problem solving, and communication. This means that although automation technology poses a pronounced effect on the job market, its capabilities cannot entirely replace the human workforce. Instead, enterprises will need to deploy a unified workforce of humans and bots.

Automation Singularity: The Collaboration of Humans and Digital Workers

The concept of automation singularity proposes that humans and bots work together to create hyper-productivity, which is not possible separately. This will result in seamless collaboration between humans and digital workers rather than a battle for dominance. It will provide the employees with the freedom to focus on higher-level, more fulfilling, and value-added tasks.

In this type of human-empowered automation for businesses, digital workers will complement human intelligence to help understand and perform higher orders of work with maximum cognitive potential. The automation success could only be achieved by unleashing the power of combined capabilities: creativity and empathy of humans alongside productivity and consistency of digital workers. This will create a new class of knowledge workers empowered by their digital partners to lead the automation journey.

Automation singularity will bring with it a range of ramifications for all imaginable facets of an organization, from recruitment to training to operations management. The shift from a parallel workforce to a unified workforce will generate rich process-level data and connect customer journeys. In short, automation singularity will disrupt the way products and services are conceived, manufactured, and delivered.

Four Key Focus Areas for Setting up Successful Automation

Despite all the reforms and challenges that automation carries, businesses can ensure successful automation journeys by focusing on these four areas:

• Strategy: It can be difficult for any business leader to navigate the ever-changing landscape of innovative technologies. However, a strategy with a long-term integration plan for automation technology should enable a larger, innovative business vision. This long-term integration strategy will encourage early Centers of Excellence (CoEs) that will provide quick wins to show automation effectiveness, building momentum toward long-term goals. It will also support equal participation from all the business units, including IT and leadership.
• Sponsorship: To establish automation for businesses, organizations need to get executive-level buy-in from their C-suite and board of directors. This executive-level sponsorship encourages two-way street communication about the automation strategy. This ensures the inclusion of overall business objectives at every level of the automation program and prevents incorrect prioritization of business processes for automation.
• Skills: People are at the center of every initiative. To drive maximum ROI and automation success, the organizations will need to reskill their employees. This upskilling around automation technology will not only support agility and innovation but will also encourage them to work with software robots in day-to-day operations for years to come.
• Platform: Choosing the right platform is paramount to achieving higher goals on an automation journey. The platform should be able to handle all the enterprise concerns regarding scale, security, and reliability. E.g., peak business loads, compliance to legal and security requirements, etc.

The Path to Achieve Seamless Human-Bot Collaboration

Organizations cannot capitalize on IA’s potential without creating an efficient roadmap towards automation singularity.

1.Discover

This first step focuses on redesigning customer journeys, identifying process automation opportunities, and management of overall automation blueprint.

2.Automate

This step deals with implementing the right technology stack and selecting the right combination of attended and unattended automation. The unattended automation is strongly controlled and is used for simple, routine processes. Whereas, in Attended Automation, people and software/robots share responsibility. There are two approaches with attended automation:

• • Robot helper: Each employee is paired with one bot, which provides support for high-volume and template-driven activities.
  • Captain and crew: Employees are assigned to be in charge of a group of bots.

3. Orchestrate

The last step is to orchestrate the human and bot tasks by linking several processes via long-running workflows. To ensure efficiency and improved

Conclusion

Businesses will have tremendous opportunities to achieve exceptional agility, speed, and personalization with the onset of automation singularity programs across industries. However, companies will need to position themselves better to facilitate the changes in organizational structures and policies.

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