In my experience working with customers and ecosystem in the intelligent automation domain, one thought always keeps coming in mind is why not scale intelligent automation to a next level. So, what is next level for Intelligent Automation?
In future, all business processes (order/quote to cash, record to report, source to pay, recruit to retire etc.) can become zero touch (no human touch); running without human intervention. We can call it “Lights-out Business Operations”, something like Lights-out manufacturing.
Example of Lights-out Business Operation
Let us try to view it from an imaginary Autonomous Cloud Kitchen which came up as an idea during a recent conversation with my 10-year-old son around role of AI, robotics & automation; here human interventions are required only to manage exceptions, to provide necessary guardrails and to guide towards future scale.
- On receiving digital orders, the robot chefs are auto instructed to cook food based on recipe, customer preferences etc. and keep it ready to be picked-up (may be by drones).
- All finance transactions are auto recorded, payments reconciled, reported & financial performance is published with continuous closing of books without manual interventions.
- Based on daily transactions, business forecasts and target segment, marketing campaigns are auto designed & run across channels to generate demand and scale the business.
- Daily consumption, demand planning & forecasts helps auto execute entire material procure to pay cycle including invoices.
- Feedbacks, customer reviews and identification of bottlenecks helps continuously improve business operations by running processes more efficiently.
- In case of exceptions humans are brought in the loop.
Essentially systems & processes are interacting with each other intelligently without any internal user interface or inputs.
Curious Mind
Many questions may start coming to our minds when we start imagining such a scenario for more complex business operations spanning geographies, industries, and regulatory environments.
- Can all the touch points of processes be digitalized in a complex ecosystem? customer touch points, partner touch points, regulatory touch points, employee touch points, physical touch points (such as goods movement)?
- Will interaction between disparate applications & systems used to run the business processes be completely automated?
- Can highly customized processes specific to a business or industry be autonomous?
- How security, risk & governance will be managed?
- What about processes where human reasoning is required?
In nutshell, is it possible? Yes, it is. Key reasons behind possibilities are two-fold; one that most of the business processes have defined variations, are executed most of the time within boundaries of business policies & rules and touches limited number of systems; and two that rapid advancement of technology provides us set of tools and smart cloud-based applications to achieve autonomously running business processes across organizations functions.
Approach to Lights-out Business Operations
Let us look at the approach on how to build the base for journey towards “Lights-out Business Operations”. We shall start small; pick-up one function/area at a time, learn and then scale it up to entire organization.
- Intelligent cloud-based SaaS applications streamline complex business processes and are open to connect & orchestrate processes autonomously, giving a solid base or foundation for the autonomous business operations. For example - SaaS application with built-in capabilities to smartly forecast demand based on various factors and plan manufacturing accordingly. On a side note, it is quite possible that many SaaS applications may move towards headless architecture with less of user interface.
- Once we have a solid base of SaaS applications, next in question comes connecting disparate apps within organization landscape among themselves and with third parties’ applications or systems. Here, we can use smart integration toolset such as iPaaS. For example, connecting multiple bank systems to auto reconcile & auto process payments.
- With most of the applications, systems connected we already have a strong foundation where many business processes are automated and running behind the scenes. Next, we must look at digitalizing or digitizing remaining manual business processes, remaining extension scenarios & remaining touch points. Availability of advanced development tools (Low-Code/No-Code) powered with AI can help us here, so much so that even citizen developers without much knowledge about coding can utilize LCNC tools. For example, building a custom native mobile app for end-customers.
- Now comes the trickiest part, how do we automate complex scenarios which goes beyond standard rules where human kind of reasoning is required, here platform which supports various AI/LLM models can help to create Autonomous Agents. Autonomous agents can use toolsets such as LCNC, iPaaS to orchestrate data across applications. For example, an autonomous agent can gather web reviews, understand market trends, check performance of past campaigns, and create a new marketing content and execute on various social channels to spur demand.
- We can further optimize performance of Autonomous Agents by feeding more intelligence to Autonomous Agents. For example – auto running process/task mining to identify bottlenecks in process executed and to auto-correct process actions in next run.
- If still process fails or gets stuck somewhere loop in humans to handle exceptional cases.
Just to summarize, with progress in AI technology, availability of smart tools and intelligent business applications, it will soon be possible to run business operations in an autonomous or in ‘Lights-out” mode bringing unprecedent efficiency to the business.
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