Predicting the future of potentially disruptive technologies has become an essential responsibility for business leaders for their organization’s survival and success, especially as digital technologies shape competitiveness in a wide variety of industries. The role of digital technologies in attaining organizational goals has increased significantly during the last few years. Enterprises, business models, products, processes, and organizational structures are now all revolutionized by the usage of new digital technologies.

Even though more business processes are now digitized than ever before, employees of both large and small businesses are still required to perform monotonous, repetitive tasks such as keying in client information from invoices, cutting and pasting data from one application to another, and answering basic customer questions via calls and chat. Employees find it increasingly difficult to engage with clients, develop new processes, and adjust to changing business conditions if these activities are not automated.

While the term “automation” and “digital transformation” are sometimes used interchangeably, their meanings are quite different. Automation is the process of using technology to make processes run more efficiently while also enhancing transparency and reporting capabilities; whereas the adoption of technology in all aspects of a business to give more value to customers faster is known as digital transformation. It’s a systemic, all-encompassing shift in the way the company functions.

To modify how they work and serve their market, new technologies are introduced to optimize or establish new business processes. This comprehensive transformation demands a cultural shift that embraces and promotes innovation. To keep up with the competition and respond to customer and market expectations, new and evolving technologies must be adapted continuously. Moving everything to the cloud and implementing a range of digital technologies are just the beginning of a digital transformation.

True digital transformation involves leveraging all digital technologies available to you, including automation and data analytics, to fundamentally change how your organization works and makes decisions.

In the digital transformation process, process automation is a necessary step. Everyone benefits from a more effective workflow when automation is implemented and integrated across the entire organization, not just IT. In a nutshell, automation is a process for achieving the goal of digital transformation. If digital transformation provides the foundation for new business prospects, automation is the mortar that keeps everything together.

The next wave of digitalization will be led by big data, intelligent automation (IA), and artificial intelligence (AI). Businesses may use big data to collect large amounts of data and generate valuable insights that can be used to make critical business decisions while cutting costs and improving revenues. However, simply collecting a big amount of data is rarely sufficient. Organizations are incorporating data analytics into their ecosystems to mass-customize offerings, optimize and improve customer experience, manage risks, and sketch out a future roadmap using data-transforming and modeling capabilities. Combining automation and data analytics can help businesses achieve faster results by improving accuracy and operational efficiency. Analytics, IA, and AI advancements are allowing organizations to boost performance and productivity while also modifying organizational structure.

Hence, automation becomes a necessary pit stop on the road towards digital transformation.

The burden of existing business processes, that consume resources and offer no time for strategy and innovation, is one of the major obstacles to digital transformation. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and intelligent automation (IA) in the cloud automate existing business processes quickly and efficiently, freeing up resources and delivering a new level of process and business intelligence, which serves as a basis for digital transformation initiatives. Hyper-automation is a way for true digital transformation, with tools like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) working together to automate complex business processes. It even automates the automation by identifying business processes dynamically and creating bots to automate them. Gartner recognized hyper-automation as one of the year’s top 10 strategic technology trends.

Processes are improved via digital transformation, while automation increases speed and reduces costs. When digital transformation is combined with process efficiency, which is enabled through automation, the result is improved business value.

According to a PwC report, emerging technologies (augmented reality, drones, virtual reality, IoT, robotics, and blockchain, are driving rapid cross-functional innovation and making businesses smarter.

The importance of Intelligent Automation (IA) in the digitalization agenda cannot be overstated. Organizations can transform their working practices by layering automation and intelligent technologies such as smart optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP)/natural language generation (NLG), and machine learning (ML).

As businesses progress along the digitalization maturity curve, IA is quickly becoming mainstream. Market expansion and citizen-led innovation in IA adoption are being fuelled by rapidly growing product capabilities.