The Value of AI in Intelligent Automation

It is difficult to underestimate AI’s significance and value to businesses. It promises to deliver large-scale productivity enhancements, which were last seen with the introduction of PCs and smartphones.

Its ability to place powerful toolsets and applications into the hands of end users promises to provide them with deep insights and operational prowess that have the potential to generate significant economic value. They will be able to launch new products and services more often, refining operational processes to squeeze out costs and streamlining added-value activities.

AI’s ability to deliver power, flexibility, as well as control, is almost peerless as a technology. Properly understood, implemented, and managed, it can help any business achieve its goals and ambitions.

Let’s explore the capabilities of AI in intelligent automation in more detail, using enhanced process automation as a use case.

The Ideal AI Use Case? Enhanced Process Automation

Process innovation is often the first place managers look when looking for efficiency savings and swifter times to market. It is a great way to improve employee productivity fast.

Enhancing process automation has typically involved significant investment in IT, business analytics, and business consulting, all underpinned by often complex business cases and project plans.

This effort can make process innovation expensive and time-consuming, with missed opportunities because a company can take too long to respond to a threat or opportunity.

AI offers the opportunity to change the traditional approach to enhancing process management by providing the right tools and insights to implement, manage, and improve AI-powered automated business processes.

How does AI create business value? Let’s take a look.

Intelligent Document Processing

The first stage of any business process – manual, semi-automated, or fully automated – is consolidating the essential core data that will, in some way, be enriched and transformed in some way, ultimately providing a business service.

In many commercial applications, this involves collecting customer contact details, order information, financial information, contracts, agreements, technical specifications, and more. This information lays the foundation for the issue a customer raises, whether related to a mortgage loan application, a contractual dispute, or an insurance claim, for example.

This information will likely be in different formats, e.g., emails, web forms, chats, paper documents, or PDF documents. These will likely use other different data formats stored in multiple locations and applications.

AI capabilities, such as Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), help users build applications that can ‘read’ enormous volumes of documents in multiple formats with numerous data configurations, helping process massive volumes of information.

All this information can be interrogated using generative AI or natural language queries, for example, to quickly and efficiently track customer information changes. Are insurance claims patterns changing, and how? Are your customer engagement channels changing, how, and by how much? What kind of problems are they looking to address? What kind of questions are they asking?

AI-powered capabilities allow users to act as data scientists, so they can apply their business acumen, experience, and expertise to leverage all this data and insight to find new and exciting ways to serve their customer’s ever-changing needs.

AI’s ability to do this at scale and speed promises to provide companies with a new dynamic for their competitive edge.

Decision Management

With all the customer case information from multiple channels and interactions consolidated in one place, decision management is the typical next step in a workflow process. Here, the organisation begins to put all this information in the proper context and pass it to the correct part of the business for resolution.

There are typically three steps in this decision-making process:

Data Enrichment

Data enrichment is where the company’s information is married to the customers so an issue can be reviewed holistically. This might be contractual information, previous correspondence, company policy information, terms and conditions, imagery, and almost anything else that can be digitised.

AI-based processes like Generative AI, Process Orchestration, and Robot Process Automation (RPA) are well-placed to manage the workflows needed to find and consolidate all this information, which will evolve as customer relationships develop and evolve.

Insight Generation

AI-based tools can help users interrogate multiple datasets – information provided by customers, corporate information, and 3rd-party data – to quickly identify the key issues and points that will help make the right decision.

Generative AI and natural language queries can help systems and users quickly make sense of complex issues, datasets, and documentation to draw out the salient points, reducing the time taken to assess an issue from days to hours and hours to minutes.

Decision Automation

With all the information consolidated and assessed, companies need to determine the right decision and steer the issue to the correct part of the business for final resolution.

AI-powered decision tables help bring order and system to a range of complex situations based on a range of variables and conditions that dictate whether a case needs to go to a person for further review, be passed onto a business application for final resolution, or passed into another workflow process for further development and assessment, for example.

Generative AI and natural language query capabilities allow an application, or a user, to assess how efficient and effective a decision management process is, highlighting trends and developments to dashboards that help show areas where decision-making criteria need to be reviewed and revised to hit operational targets for accuracy, throughput, and efficiency.

Process Orchestration

With a decision made by a person or an automated process, the next step is to dispatch the case and associated information to the next stage. AI-based RPA capabilities ensure that a case moves to the correct destination using the optimal route, depending on systems, network availability, and security issues.

This will likely feature task automation to ensure relevant processes are kicked off in the next stage, whether through email, APIs, or another method. Workflow automation, with the ability to highlight and resolve bottlenecks that ensure constant process optimisation, is key, with human oversight and management reporting core to ensuring that the power and flexibility of AI are effectively harnessed.

The Business Value of AI in Intelligent Automation

Even just using this process automation case highlights the significant power that AI in intelligent automation can offer the business. The ability to trawl vast, complex data sets using automation and directed analytics promises companies the ability to generate new insights in near real-time to launch new products and services fast.

Automated and guided decision support can quickly resolve simple and complex issues, while process orchestration can ensure the right outcome is reached swiftly and efficiently.

AI allows reviewing these end-to-end processes in real-time, so process optimisation becomes a dream rather than a chore.

But let’s add a note of caution. Those who win with technology always place the customer at the centre, with the overall customer experience being key to the whole process. Unless carefully thought through, understood, and controlled, the sheer power and flexibility of dynamism of AI also has the scope to undo the hard work of many years very quickly if it is not carefully managed.

How Can Telic Digital Help You?

Telic Digital helps its clients create significant value by streamlining their digital transformation and automation of their processes. We can help cut through all the jargon and help companies fully capture the value of AI to drive business growth and development.

We partner with premiere AI technology providers to help our clients develop the right approach to fully capture AI’s business value.

Learn more here.