ISG Provider Lens™ Intelligent Automation - Services and Solutions - Next-gen Automation - U.S. 2022
Intelligent automation services define the digital roadmap.
Global enterprises are building new digital platforms to implement automation solutions that can replicate human action and eliminate employee routine tasks to achieve higher outcomes across industry verticals. Automation creates a new paradigm of people, processes and technology collaboration that complements and enhances business outcomes.
The U.S. is a leading adopter of automation technology, accounting for almost 45 percent of the market revenue share in 2022. Enterprises in this region are early adopters of the technology, and most industries have witnessed accelerated digital transformation by using these solutions. They are increasing their spend on automation software to implement intelligent automation techniques for improving business processes and overall productivity. Given these positive trends, the intelligent automation market is forecast to reach over $19 billion by 2023.
Intelligent automation is a combination of RPA, business process management (BPM) and AI, which enables predictive action for business processes to decide the corresponding action. It involves designing and creating end-to-end processes that support augmenting human experience with automation.
As a result, enterprises globally are reconsidering different ways to accelerate their digital transformation journey. The technology has evolved to combine several approaches for addressing diverse business challenges. Business functions such as financial services, contact center outsourcing, BPO, human resources outsourcing (HRO) and procurement outsourcing are experiencing rapid growth in the automation space. In the financial sector, intelligent process automation (IPA) technology can assist institutions in managing routine processes. It allows minimal intervention and improved controllership, accuracy and compliance to regulations. Business leaders are evaluating automation capability to drive innovation and user experience in the healthcare sector too. It reduces costs and improves business function affordability by automating tasks such as customer/ patient scheduling, health insurance processing, regulatory compliance and patient monitoring.
IT operation teams are constantly seeking solutions and tools to monitor the large volumes of data generated by enterprise systems for any alerts or anomalies. Most enterprises handle these tasks manually and perform the same process repeatedly, leading to an increase in downtime and outages as the data proliferates. Such manual processes result in heavy losses and increase the risk of human errors and longer resolution wait times.
AIOps solutions use machine learning algorithms to detect anomalies and correlate, streamline and resolve various processes by automating repetitive tasks. They assist by continuously learning from past issues and resolutions to suggest the best path. AIOps improves incident management by decreasing downtime and outages and enhancing performance and profitability.
These capabilities are increasingly driving technology operations through machine learning and deep learning for modernizing IT workflow platforms. Practice teams, product engineering groups and technology verticals combine the capabilities to build proprietary, in-house cognitive solutions for IT operations. These solutions integrate with information systems that generate a continuous data source through logs, files and alerts, which are tracked and processed through machine learning algorithms. Collection methods, analytical programming and presentation technologies converge through data visualization into a unified view for better management. The platform provides various IT operations disciplines with advanced analytical and automation capabilities.
Some of the major driving forces for the AIOps market include the growing demand of enterprises for modernizing and automating their IT operations, migration of workloads toward cloud and multi-cloud environments, and increased venture funding and investment activities in the AIOps sector over the last couple of years. In addition, the market presents a significant potential for automation and RPA vendors to align with the infrastructure management strategy. Globally, enterprises are shifting their focus to large-scale automation of the business process for all corporate functions to increase efficiency and gain a competitive edge.
The intelligent automation space is maturing and transforming business processes globally. Companies are seeing robots replicating human brain activity and improvising the business information technology processes. Manufacturing, supply chain, healthcare, financial institutions and many other industries are being transformed digitally by automating continuous and repetitive tasks. Integrating AI and machine learning with automation technologies has led to intelligent automation systems that can predict issues and create solutions to tackle emergencies and reduce human error. Furthermore, the combination of intelligent automation and RPA can transform business processes by using next-generation automation technologies of intelligent automation and RPA can transform business processes by using next-generation automation technologies.
The next-generation automation perspective redefines and guides businesses to comprehend future customer expectations and build service offerings to lead and guide the market. There is an increased focus on technology diverging from the human component, which is a crucial aspect covered in next-gen automation. Because customer expectations and experience are the top priorities, there is a need to exercise the fundamentals and design thinking concepts to reengineer customer journeys. Companies are increasingly adopting design thinking to drive innovation at every stage of the journey to differentiate themselves in the market.
Implementing automation requires careful strategy and an educated approach to control and curtail the impact on human resources. Organizational change management (OCM) is another crucial aspect that should be aligned with intelligent automation programs to continuously manage the outcome by training, educating and consulting with the human resources influenced by automation initiatives. OCM skillfully drives the automation initiative with a high success rate and adoption index.
Automation service providers are extending their consulting services and insights by building an automation center of excellence (CoE) along with practice runbooks to help build competency. These CoEs help and guide the automation delivery teams to follow a standard framework to build bots and sustainable solutions, increasing the operating life of the components created.
The technology space is experiencing a perennial shortfall of talent across all evolving technologies, including automation. Service integrators are devising strategies to onboard these resources and build a continuous flow of trained and certified resources on popular automation platforms.
Technology service providers must connect with educational institutions to create and acquire talent and prepare them for the future. Enterprises should focus on creating a skilled workforce with functional expertise on automation technologies, alongside its implementation and application knowledge. As a result, enterprises are adopting intelligent automation solutions, and global service integrators are ramping up the competency and capability of technical and functional services to meet the demand.
Businesses are ready to invest in and adopt next-generation automation technologies, and automation providers have adopted different inorganic and organic growth strategies to achieve sustainable automation. Additionally, there are many startups and SMEs that have innovative and out-of-the-box automation offerings that cater to a larger audience. Therefore, the trend is expected to rise exponentially in the future, with the increasing availability of customized and tailored automation solutions for enterprise needs.
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