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This year the analytics specialists from Gartner named 10 main technology trends that businesses should seriously consider in the upcoming year. These trends were mainly influenced by the pandemic and new reality the businesses and people faced in 2020 and they will keep being actual up to 2025.
The quarantine and transfer to remote work demonstrated that many companies lack flexibility and smart tools to ensure stable performance outside of the office. And this definitely should be changed with the help of digital optimization. One of the main trends highlighted by Gartner specialists was hyperautomation. So let’s take a closer look at it to discover what it implies, what businesses can make use of it, what technologies it includes and what benefits they offer.
What is hyperautomation trend about?
We all are familiar with an automation trend that came long ago and made numerous businesses perform integration of the software and implementation of new digital productivity tools. But what is hyperautomation’s purpose? Well it is similar to the common automation, it implies the usage of technology to automate tasks and unload employees in any business industry.
If previously companies all over the world strived to automate certain tasks, now everything shifted towards automation of the processes which are more complex and holistic than separate tasks. Hyperautomation is about functional improvements of a company and creating its so-called digital twin. And this would not be possible without the latest technologies that hypeautomation deals with. Among them you’ll see:
- Intelligent business management software,
- Artificial intelligence (AI),
- Machine learning (ML),
- Internet of Things (IoT),
- Robotics.
All these technologies are used to automate routine processes, minimize human workforce, and boost companies productivity. Hyperautomation implies the usage of numerous smart tools for data-driven decision making, moving the processes to the digital space, visualizing and observing key performance indexes, and for getting new significant business growth and improvement opportunities.
The experts claim that thanks to hyperautomation businesses will be able to achieve collaborative intelligence. It is when human and smart systems and machines are working together to ensure the highest possible productivity. Humans can train machines and software, while smart AI solutions will help them to make the best business decisions and improve the quality of provided services. The Harvard Business Review has published an article called “Collaborative intelligence” in which they explained the value of human-machine cooperation.
At organizations in all kinds of industries, humans and AI are collaborating to improve five elements of business processes: flexibility, speed, scale, decision making, personalization.
The Harvard Business Review
And this quote emphasizes the main goal of hyperautomation – overall business improvement, ability to rethink and change typical work by delegating not only tasks but the whole processes to technologies and machines. Such business giants as Pfizer, Mercedes Benz, Unilever and Autodesk are already taking advantage of collaborative intelligence. So it is the right time to think about your business transformation.
Top 3 hyperautomation technologies
When it comes to technology integration, the first thing you need to think about is how seamless that process will be. It is not enough to buy software, invest in custom development and incorporate as many tools as possible. Whatever you are going to change, it should be done seamlessly. So if you are integrating an AI powered platform or smart business intelligence tool, you need to make sure that they will be connected with other tools used in your company.
Hyperautomation requires interoperability. What is the purpose of all high tech tools if you cannot make them work cohesive? To get the maximum from hyperautomation you need to take care of how the tools work together, how they exchange the data, complement each other’s work and achieve the general goal.
If you made a decision to automate processes in your company, then you should take into account that technologies can be blended. You do not need to choose only one and stick with it. And this is the best thing about hyperautomation. You can use the power of all smart technologies like AI, ML, IoT or robotics to the fullest. And now let’s take a closer look at them and some examples of how you can apply those technologies to your business.
Artificial Intelligence
AI is not a new trend, for more than 10 years it is being used in many successful companies all over the world. Business owners understand the wide range of benefits that this technology offers. If you teach an AI powered solution to perform some tasks, it will perform it way faster that a human being. And with time the speed will increase further. So with new hyperautomation trend AI reaches the top of its popularity. Here are the most popular forms of AI that your can consider for your businesee automation:
- Voice recognition – voice assistants like Alexa for Business are great helpers that should not be neglected. Also there are solutions that can recognize not only voice commands but also the pronunciation, speed of talking, and perform speech-to-text manipulation. This helps to automate some routine processes like cold calls and automatic replies, perform real time translation, enabling more advanced systems.
- Image recognition – this technology is able to improve security, automate access to certain systems or documents, replace human resources, recognize gestures. All these abilities can be used to the benefit of a business and contribute to hyperautomation.
- Face recognition – like image recognition, this technology helps to improve security level and implement different levels of access in your company. No passwords are required to enter a lab or open a classified solution if you implemented face recognition.
- Machine learning – this is the technology that lets an application acquire knowledge from data, process it and perform advanced and accurate forecasting, automate data entry, offer personalized client experience, ensure higher level of cybersecurity, and perform predictive maintenance and diagnostic of equipment.
- Natural language processing – this technology is used mainly for spam detection, speech recognition, machine translation and predictive operations like typing, answering the questions, autocompleting sentences and many more.
AI is one of the most popular technologies used by various companies. Among real success examples you will find Pandora (not a bracelet manufacturer, but a music streaming service). Thanks to AI Pandora generates personalized recommendations based on people preferences in songs, their playlists and artists they prefer.
Starbucks also uses AI for more custom recommendations. The visitors of Starbucks can install its app which will collect the data about their orders and preferences, and based on their coffee and desserts choices, the bartenders can recommend people what to try next time.
Many clinics and treatment facilities use AI powered data aggregators to pull the patient data from specific internal systems instantly and perform more precise diagnostics. This also improves cooperation between medical colleagues and clinics.
Internet of Things
IoT development is the future of every office and the key to effective processes automation. Smart assistants, reliable security systems, usage of various wearable devices, sensors and IoT powered apps can help you get rid of the routine tasks, ensure data safety, cut energy consumption and costs in the company.
Thanks to IoT you can even reduce the number of employees in your company. For example smart devices can perform cleaning and climate control instead of a real person. IoT devices like wearables can collect the data about the patient or employee, transfer it to a unified system and then process. So many things can be done faster and better by a smart system, for example it can perform exploitation of cloud computing, integrate with the blockchain technology, perform voice and body motion recognition.
Speaking about companies that work with huge loads of data and need to process it and analyze it on a daily basis, it would be reasonable to consider implementation of IoT analytics. It offers a high level of automation able to minimize costs and the need to use human resources. You can even solve productivity problems faster and automatically and benefit from risks minimization.
Robotic Processes Automation
RPA is the technology that lets you configure a robot or a smart solution to perform various range of tasks that are usually done by humans. RPA can perform data collection and application manipulations via interfaces. This technology is rather fast, requires minimum upfront investments, and what’s more important it is highly scalable. So if you use this hyperautomation tool in your company, you will be able to make it adapt to all changes happening in your company and it will grow together with your business.
These tools can be especially useful for banking institutions, insurance, healthcare, manufacture, and some specific businesses involved in high-tech, energetics, and many more. RPA can improve productivity and boost the speed of work in your company drastically. You can delegate not only some simple tasks but the whole range of processes to this technology and only monitor how everything is done. RPA also can reduce your company operational costs by up to 70% and improve accuracy while performing different processes. Robotics is never tired, so human mistakes will not take place anymore, which is great.
For example, Mercedes Benz is already using RPA technology. Its robotics works alongside humands to perform alterations of cars and their customization in real time. To discover the full power of robotic processes automation, check out the video below that explains its key principles in 5 minutes.
Benefits of hyperautomation
Before describing the key advantages of huperautomation, we’d like to mention what businesses will benefit from it the most. Among all industries we would name transportation and logistics, healthcare, construction, material manufacturing, clothing design and production, education, travel and booking, real estate and resale.
All these industries are rather complex ones and they are dealing with numerous processes on a daily basis. Therefore hyperautomation that aims to reduce workload on employees and delegate the processes to machines and systems is the best choice for all those businesses.
Hyperautomation is like the next element of the huge business evolution chain. The previous huge step was digitalization that helped to transfer all information into the digital space. Now to process and use that information you need automation which requires minimum human efforts. And IoT along with machine learning will play a major part in the automation process.
Alex Pedchenko
Indeed, why overuse your company resources or stick to the systems that are not productive enough, if there are better ways to do your business and make it more efficient and profitable? So before you consider any changes, let’s take a quick look at the major pros of hyperautomation for companies.
FAQ
To wrap it up
Each year we hear new business trends. Some of them come and go, but the ones like hyperautomation are with us for years. If the past 5 years were dedicated to digitalization, the upcoming 5 ones will be about implementation of smart automation tools for business. So if you still stick to the old but gold strategy and rely on your employees, it is high time to think about hyperautomation.
With automation tools you can be sure that your company will keep functioning stable because it has its digital twin and there is an interoperability of all systems, platforms and tools. These days delegating processes to automations tools is a wise and visionary decision that will bring numerous benefits and opportunities to your business.
