Are you ready to capture a $200 Bn. Automation Market this Decade

Bank of America Merrill Lynch in a report dated November 2019, predicted that automation would delete 800 million human jobs by 2035. (Source Click Here).

McKinsey Global Institute estimated that as many as 400 million workers—or 15 percent of the global workforce—would have to switch occupations or acquire new skills by 2030 because of automation and artificial intelligence (Source Click Here)

Gartner Predicts 69% of Routine Work Currently Done by Managers will Be Fully Automated by 2024 (Source Click Here).

While the above predictions made by analysts based on strong research are going to come true someday questions to worry about today are …  

-         Do we have the right workforce to implement Automation and AI Technologies. World Economic Forum report shows a raising demand of 133 Million additional resources are required to fulfil the promise of implementing Automation and AI led technologies (Source Click Here).

-         Do we know or is there a well-defined framework on what should be Automated and what should not be. How do we choose a process to be automated and which technology or tool is the best fit for 100% end to end automation at scale and with quality.

-         How do we overcome the hurdles of unable to implement Automation as envisioned, there is a huge gap on what is evangelized and what is implemented.  According to an E&Y Study 30% to 50% of Automation Projects Fail (Source Click Here)

There are many unanswered questions, and we continue to find answers, there is no one correct solution to this. Unlike any new technology introduced goes through “Supply – Demand Gap, Change Management and Adoption curve” so is the affairs with Automation and AI which are still in its infancy stage of implementation though research is few decades old.  

The ecosystem which consists of R & D Firms, Consulting Firms, Product and Platform Providers, Service Integrators, Enterprise and Customers together can work to bridge the gaps across People, Process, Technology and create a framework for tomorrow to meet the ever-increasing demand. Failure to align, adopt and focus will cause severe challenges and the end results may be disheartening, lets look at each of the areas and possible ways to contribute to success  

1.      PEOPLE :  

We are today traversing the evolutionary improvement path from ad hoc, inconsistently performed practices, into a mature, disciplined, and continuously improving world with right knowledge, skills, and motivation of the workforce that enhances strategic business performance.

There is a need to bridge the skill gap and very less work is done in this area. Organizations still relay on yester year job profiles like Product Managers, Project Managers, Business Analysts, Solutions Architects, Support Associates who are essentially using the Gen X methodologies and trying to force fit into the millennial technology.

The ask of the hour is to reskill the associates and create roles like Automation Economist, Empathy Trainer, No-Code/Low Code Visualizer, BOT Copywriter and Curator, Hu-Bot Coordinator, Social Media Listener, BOT Support Engineer, Tech Ethicist, and very importantly an HR Role which can seamlessly visualize and define policies on how the Machines and Humans collaborate. Your next desk neighbor may not be a human talent but a human like machine. A study shows 64% Of Workers Trust A Robot More Than Their Manager (Source : Click Here)

We need the entire Resource Supply Chain to participate in transforming and transitioning into the new expectation, right from the universities to the Gig workforce and the pillars of the well-established ecosystem have a critical role to play here. The organization L&D departments should gear up and demonstrate thought leadership in this direction and lead from front.

2.      Process:

Gartner says that process automation focuses on providing “freedom within a box.” Process becomes less about automation and more about the dynamic orchestration of human, machine and information resource interactions to deliver an optimal outcome.

There is a need to focus on cultural change and move away from the yester year Process Excellence or Operational Excellence practices into adopting Intelligent and Autonomous Business Processes including Autonomous Process Modelling and Autonomous Monitoring,  Autonomous Analytics and Autonomous Process Optimization. The role of the Process Owners is to drive innovation without impacting business continuity and create mechanisms to maximize opportunities to optimize process workflow without human assistance.

A few such use cases that are prevalent today are

o  Auto-generation of repeatable documents, such as contracts, invoices or loan documents.

o  Servicing customer support requests within an enterprise, including the routing of tickets to departments or contacts.

o  Planning the transportation of goods in supply chain and logistics applications using Intelligent Object Routing Processes

o  Automatically discover explicit as well as implicit process flows by observing actual human, data, and system operation.

o  Automatically identify actual key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that determine process efficiency, understand system data and interface changes and make dynamic process changes.

In the near future …

Imagine an automated car that does not have the level of intelligence or independence that an autonomous car has. ... A truly autonomous car would decide on destination and route as well as control within the lanes. Such fleets of autonomous taxis will overtake the automakers.

Imagine A software robot that can, autonomously, connect to databases to retrieve information, apply control rules, perform processes that produce new data, and then inject them into other applications using their own intelligent programming interfaces.

Imagine a Healthcare Autonomous robot augment a human therapist as a digital twin, mimicking the patient functionality “before” the pathology/trauma and with applications using that starting point to develop the customized rehab protocol to be assisted by the robot

While there are thousands of such opportunities visible, its critical for the process owners to ensure their playbooks are ready with clear definitions and mature enough to seamlessly turn autonomous and easy to scale.

3.      Technology Maturity and Innovation

The product and platform providers need to widen their vision and strategy to support business needs and ability to achieve end to end 100% automation using one single product.

Today one of the barriers for the decision makers is the lack of all features available in one product and the fear exponentially grows to take risk with their enterprise architecture and increase the technology debt with multiple integrations. Needless to say the overheads and the cost too, but driven by Moore’s Law, the day is not far when intelligent features will become available to almost anyone, everywhere providing immersive experience instead of eyeing Automation as separate entity we will see this disruptive force as a digital companion or a digital twin augmenting human.

There is still a lot of confidence building the new platforms need to provide to the business enterprise while the service integrators come to rescue with hand full of accelerators and connectors they build as a stop gap arrangement. There is always a concern of change management which haunts and more so the unknown risks and liabilities that crown if an autonomous machine malfunction.

Very importantly extent of integration with enterprise strategies and governance becomes a critical decision point the technology evangelists need to focus upon. Architectural oversight and platform standards are necessary to maintain the integrity of the underlying platform technology.

Conclusion

Amazon’s robot workforce in warehouses has grown from 1,000 to nearly 50,000 since 2014. “And they have never laid off anyone, other than for performance reasons, in their distribution centers,”. Its incorrect to say people will not have jobs, but the type of jobs people do will be different.

Beyond doubt, this decade will clearly establish and mark the innovations out of the labs into main stream usage, given the Covid19 scenario the adoption also is accelerated. While the vision is clear it still requires action to be clarified and refined, and execution requires reflection to be effective.

Opportunities are knocking the doors and the players in the market need to pick and chose their space and declare their intentions to the world out there, the Product and Platforms players need to share the roadmap upfront while the Service Integrators should work on creating a strong resource pool to address the talent short fall to meet the needs of the Enterprise and end customers.

The time is now, the future is now, the opportunities are now … lets welcome with open arms and work towards defining a framework  which will be of mutual benefits to all players, clearly call out a joint go to market and be open to collaborate in this competing ecosystem to build a future and cherish a pie from this $200 Bn. market growing at a double digit CAGR.

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