Intelligent automation

Broadly speaking, IA refers to the use of automation technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Business Process Management (BPM), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) together to streamline and scale workflow and decision-making across organizations. You might also hear about the term hyperautomation, which was defined by Gartner [3], where they refer to it as a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to automate as many business and IT processes as possible. In a way, IA is often used within the context of the overall hyperautomation initiative of an organization. [4]

We believe that there are three key motivations driving the need for IA:

• Speed and rate of changes – With the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have had to change how they work, how they interact with their customers, their sales models, and many of them have even had to change their products. Additionally, many of these businesses realize that they have to react and make changes within days as opposed to weeks or months. This has resulted in an unprecedented pace of digital transformation, and success, in many cases, depends on how fast an organization can react to sudden changes and real-time decisions.
• Stay competitive through better customer experience – These days, in order for businesses to stay competitive, they have to improve their customer engagement experience (for example, NPS score and retention ratio), but at the same time, they need to make sure their operating cost is under control and be able to do more with less.
• Labor shortage – Many businesses are suffering from labor shortages and many have a high volume of repetitive tasks that are still being performed manually.

To create a successful IA project, we believe an integrated automation platform that supports a low-code/no-code approach to automation is necessary to engage everyone in the enterprise to create a usable and scalable solution. This is where IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation comes in.