EFFECTIVELY LEADING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION - EVOLUTION OF AUTOMATION AND AI:

"Digital transformation is not about technology - it’s about change."

Digital transformation requires a lot more than technology. It's a fundamental cultural change for an organization and what makes up the organization's culture. A very big part of that is people. Getting people to think about things in a different way is not as simple as some leader making a pronouncement in the all hands meeting.

One little problem with the vast amount of data available to us these days, how on earth do you possibly use it?

• How do you find what you're looking for?
• How do you even know what to look for?
• And when you've found it, how could you effectively process and work with it?

Well, luckily for us, along with the increased data, we have a greatly increased ability to use technology to help us work with it. I've already mentioned things like Power BI and Tableau as ways to help visualize data, but there are other tools that will carry some of the workload for us.

Using software to automate tasks isn't really anything new. Even early versions of Microsoft Office products and similar tools had the ability to create macros, in effect, prerecorded step-by-step automated routines that could be used to perform calculations, to copy and move information from one place to another, and so on.

"Technology is best when it brings people together."

• SharePoint and other ERP-like platforms have more advanced capabilities that can recognize predefined triggers and perform tasks like sending notifications and alerts, or updating and creating records, or even deleting old records.
• Microsoft's Power platform tools take this even further, allowing people to create automated routines that can work across different applications and databases, including non-Microsoft ones.
• Other popular tools include Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere, but this is still just a start. You'd have to kind of been living under a rock to not have heard about AI, artificial intelligence, in 2023.
• We'll get into this in much more depth a little later in the course, but we've actually been exposed to AI and AI-like tools for a while now. At its simplest, things like product recommendations from online shopping sites require analysis of purchases and activities, then correlating that to similar characteristics.
• Chatbots use machine learning and cognitive computing to read user questions and provide easy-to-understand human language responses. AI powers tools like Microsoft SharePoint Syntex.
• Syntex can take scanned documents and forms, convert them into digitized information, analyze that information, identify predefined types of information, and then extract it and add it to metadata fields inside a SharePoint library.

This does in seconds what can take hours of exhaustive human labor. At its most advanced, AI not only identifies and analyzes information, but it uses that information to make business decisions without any human intervention at all.