The cardinal focus of every business is to boost productivity, increase revenue and streamline operations, three things that are imperative to sustain in today’s highly-competitive landscape. Over the last few years, many companies have accelerated their digital transformation journey to meet the aforementioned goals effectively. They have started leveraging robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics and more such cutting-edge technologies.

And while the pandemic has brought drastic changes in our lifestyle, it has also taught us to stay prepared for uncertain and unexpected events. Business leaders are also taking this lesson to heart and using futuristic technologies like automation to remain agile in the unforeseeable future. In addition, the advent of modern technologies has also transformed the way employees and consumers function in their respective spaces. Employees are now able to streamline their energy into more tangible things and leave processes like invoices, gathering data and answering basic customer queries to digital technologies. Consumers have also become used to encountering such tech-enabled solutions and features at every step of their daily life.

As more and more businesses started relying on the various benefits of digital transformation, it became clear that experimenting with such technologies was the only way to reach their goals. And, thus the combination of RPA and AI took place, which resulted in intelligence automation (IA). Unlike its predecessors, IA is far more advanced, accessible and convenient. In fact, even people with non-technical skills or backgrounds can easily take advantage of this innovation and conduct their business without needing the help of an expert.

According to a recent Deloitte report, businesses using IA correctly are likely to witness an average cost reduction of 22% and increased revenue of 11% in the next three years. In fact, organisations currently scaling IA have already achieved a 27% average cost reduction from their implementation.

Against this backdrop, here are a few reasons why IA has the potential to enhance the core services, operations and results of a business:

Customer experience: Customer is king, an age-old mantra that still plays a pivotal role in the success of any business. Organisations working strenuously to improve customer experience and introduce more personalised features have an added advantage over their competitors.

In this context, IA is proving crucial for companies. It can swiftly accumulate data and constructively engage with customers through innovative advanced chatbot software. For instance, many fintech platforms use IA to answer basic customer queries so that designated human resources (customer executives) can focus on resolving complex customer issues. Integrating IA into customer engagement is a small yet meaningful step to enhancing an organisation’s overall productivity.

Employee engagement: An employee is likely to leave the job if they don’t find their personal goals aligned with the company. Spending time on trivial tasks can significantly impact an employee’s morale and prompt them to look for better opportunities elsewhere. After all, everyone wants to grow and be appreciated for something creative or revolutionary.

By harnessing the ability of IA, organisations can essentially automate tedious and repetitive manual tasks and assign high-value and skill-based work to the employees. This will help the organisations retain a talented workforce, and enable employees to hone their skills by doing more satisfying tasks. For instance, a large United States federal government agency has introduced IA to automate their standard administrative functions and deploy highly-acclaimed specialists to focus on innovation and more strategic tasks.

Procure-to-pay management: At every company, various low-value and time-consuming tasks often delay the more important work or reduce their productivity. However, these seemingly trivial tasks are crucial for the company’s day-to-day operations, so they cannot be avoided. This includes vendor and invoice management, transaction details from a myriad of sources and various other things. Moreover, the bigger the business, the more complex tracking and managing the data becomes.

This is where IA is proving revolutionary. The procure-to-pay (P2P) process is perfect for IA as it helps companies keep track of volumes of transactions/data/information, and simplify the purchase or buying process. In addition, considering it is a fully automated process, it doesn’t procure stacks of physical documents. The IA-enabled P2P process also saves time and money for the organisation, improves employee productivity, and transparently nurtures the vendor-organisation relationship.

Tap the full potential of your organisation

The segments mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg. IA has many more ways to enhance an organisation’s overall productivity and profitability. To successfully deploy IA, a company must supply a basic understanding of automated processes to its workforce. As technology continues to evolve and the needs and challenges of businesses and consumers change, IA will play a vital role in helping leaders stay agile. Needless to say, in the coming years, IA will become an integral part of emerging and existing businesses that aspire to make the most of it.

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