5 Insights from Deloitte's Intelligent Automation survey

Management Consultancies are an excellent source of information to understand how the Artificial Intelligence market is evolving and how executives are responding. In the ‘Consulting Condensed’ series, I briefly summarise their key findings, so you don’t have to read the lengthy original reports.

Over the last few years, Deloitte has surveyed executives about their Intelligent Automation strategies and the results they have achieved. They recently released the 2019 results in Automation with Intelligence: Reimagining the organization in the ‘Age of With'.

Here are the five main insights I gained from reading the report:

The number of organizations who have “scaled” their automation implementations has doubled since 2018. However, despite the pace of progress, few have scaled - only eight per cent have deployed more than 51 automations. There remains a huge opportunity.

Basic rules-based automation of tasks using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) fueled early automation initiatives. These “low-value” opportunities have been rapidly exhausted. Executives are using “next-generation solutions” powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to “make automations smarter and to provide more value”.

Intelligent Automation (which combines RPA and AI) is becoming mainstream. Forty-seven per cent of organizations have combined the two technologies in some way. Executives are pursuing increased productivity, cost reduction, improved accuracy, and better customer experiences.

Intelligent Automation implementations are “exceeding expectations”, with fast payback (within just nine months). Those using AI report a three times higher revenue impact than those using RPA alone, and greater gains in workforce capacity.

There are three main adoption barriers to overcome: identification of appropriate use cases, data issues (for example, privacy or quality), and the availability and capability of talent. These are challenges DataRobot is tackling head-on. 

DataRobot’s Enterprise AI platform automates and accelerates every step across the lifecycle of implementing AI. The latest release (5.2) introduced our AI Catalogue to manage data better. DataRobot’s AI success managers guide executives on good use cases, using our wealth of experience.