What is Intelligent Automation
Intelligent automation consists of technologies that empower organizations with streamlined, agile processes for better business and smarter decisions.
Examples of these technologies include RPA, AI, OCR, process mining, machine learning, intelligent capture, and more.
Depending on your business needs, you may only implement one tool, but they are often combined for optimal impact. Unlike traditional automation, these technologies learn as they go, which means their performance improves in accuracy and efficiency over time. They anticipate the needs of your users and customers while allowing your employees to focus on more enjoyable, high-value tasks.
But to achieve sustained results that can scale and evolve alongside the market and your business needs, intelligent automation can’t stop with implementing a new technology.
That’s why you’ll often hear “intelligent automation” in the context of an “intelligent automation journey.”
What is an Intelligent Automation Journey?
An intelligent automation journey is a long-term commitment to:
- Streamlining your processes
- Eliminating manual work
- Creating a better customer and employee experience
But a successful intelligent automation journey cannot occur without effective change management. All parties must be able and willing to adapt rapidly and communicate freely. As a result, organizations must create and nurture an innovative digital culture that isn’t afraid of change or failure. With everybody on board, your intelligent automation journey will empower your employees to work in new, better ways. It will also radically improve overall enterprise performance.
What’s the Purpose of an Intelligent Automation Journey?
- Operate with exceptional speed, efficiency, accuracy, and even save you money
- Improve your customer experience
- Make your organization future-proof
- Support digital revenue streams or tap into new ones
Change is inevitable in business operations, from customer expectations and market trends to technological innovations. As a result, businesses across industries must have the resources and an agile mindset to scale and adapt as needed.
In this ever-evolving digital age, it’s a matter of survival. Organizations that pivot and embrace change in this digital economy see success. Companies that resist may find themselves falling behind. But while new technology may threaten old business practices, it can also create unprecedented growth and innovation opportunities. There’s no better time to set off on your intelligent automation journey than now, and we’re here to help.
How to Make Your Intelligent Automation Journey a Success
What are the Key Components of Intelligent Automation?
Intelligent automation is a broad term that encapsulates so much it can feel overwhelming. Let’s start with the key components. Although their implementation will look different between organizations, there are the four key elements that every successful intelligent automation journey should prioritize.
1. Transform Your Customer Experience
Organizations across industries are increasingly looking for ways to improve the customer experience. While intelligent automation can potentially impact every aspect of organizations, it often makes its most significant mark on the customer experience.
And it’s no secret: Many organizations are pursuing intelligent automation to respond to market realities and keep up with their customers’ habits and expectations.
Often, organizations opt to improve their customer experience using tools like new communication channels, AI-powered search agents, AI-powered chatbots, accessible self-service portals, and personalization using advanced analytics tools. Each of these advancements aims to create unique, smoother, and more convenient digital customer experiences. The kinds of experiences that you’ll remember for the right reasons and look forward to returning to.
And that focus on the experience can’t be emphasized enough. It’s easy to get excited about the shiny new technologies we see, but it’s important to avoid starting your intelligent automation journey with your heart set on a specific feature or system. A common mistake is placing too much energy on the technology itself and making it the primary focus. Having the smartest, cutting-edge technology is fantastic. But nobody wins if you lose your customer’s favor in the process. As a result, you must understand your customer before anything else.
Understanding Today’s Customer
Simply having a top-of-the-line product or fantastic service is no longer enough. The modern customer expects the best possible end-to-end customer experience and is no longer willing to settle for poor or even “just okay” experiences. According to a recent Salesforce State of Marketing report, 85% of consumers believe a brand’s ability to deliver great experiences is just as important as the products or services it provides.
But what makes a great customer experience?
The modern customer expects fast-paced, personalized service in virtually everything they do. They also demand to be served from wherever they are, no matter the time of day. Self-service options are also increasing in vitality, as 81% of consumers prefer to do online research before contacting a company or finalizing a purchase.
What Makes Your Customer Unique?
While market trends like the ones we just examined are valuable, it’s worth digging deeper: What makes your customer unique? How do these preference trends apply to your customer base and service offerings?
Many organizations explore these questions by building analytics capabilities to get to know their customers. Another common initiative is driving customer behavior by organizing analytics-driven experiments. Creating customer personas or talking to your customers to hear more about their experiences, likes, and dislikes are also great strategies.
Keeping in the future-focused mindset, recognizing what your customer’s current expectations are is critical. Whatever tactics you used to initially secure them as customers may not be enough to keep them around in the future. But if you grow and evolve along with your customers, those relationships are likely to flourish.
2. Change Management: Culture in the Digital Age
Address the Elephant in the Room
Your talented employees are full of potential. But they must understand that your intelligent automation initiative isn’t just another IT project that won’t affect them. It’s going to radically change how they do their daily jobs for the better.
You’ve likely heard the age-old concern, “Robots are going to steal all our jobs.” It’s only risen in prominence since AI exploded into the mainstream with ChatGPT’s introduction, and as AI technology has rapidly advanced since then. The fear of being replaced is real and can lead to resistance. Don’t be afraid to address it head-on. Make your intelligent automation journey an open conversation. Clearly communicate to your employees why you’re pursuing it in the first place. Understanding the why behind the change can help employees feel invested in the idea of intelligent automation technologies improving their daily lives, lowering resistance.
Let Employees Know How the Change Will Directly Benefit Them
Above all, help your employees to understand how intelligent automation will directly benefit them. Emphasize that with intelligent automation, technology doesn’t make them obsolete. It’s an opportunity for them to upgrade and develop their expertise to become even better at their jobs and thrive in the long run. It shifts their role to be responsible for higher-value tasks. They can say goodbye to the dreaded tedious, manual tasks that used to slow them down. Everybody wins. But the win is only as big as cooperation is widespread.
However, this communication must go both ways. Listen to your employees’ concerns and feedback. Ensure that they feel heard, as this will help to build critical employer-employee trust. Ultimately, this bond can positively impact employee engagement and loyalty, as well.
Emphasizing the positive changes from intelligent automation is also a pivotal step to fostering a change-positive culture. For more on change management and how to promote a healthy organizational culture, go to our “Be an Agent of Change” section below.
3. Build an AI Center of Excellence
AI is a core component of intelligent automation technologies, but to implement it into your business successfully and ultimately scale it requires great precision and consideration. As a result, many organizations are establishing an AI Center of Excellence (CoE). This centralized team drives strategy, ethical use, governance, and innovation across departments.
An AI CoE helps you:
- Align AI initiatives with business goals
- Prioritize high-impact use cases
- Ensure responsible AI practices (privacy, bias mitigation, transparency)
- Empower your workforce with training and change management
- Build repeatable, scalable processes for AI adoption
You can think of your AI CoE as the engine behind your intelligent automation journey, keeping it focused, ethical, and future-ready.
4. Transform Your Operational Processes
You can’t have a successful intelligent automation initiative without transforming your operational processes. From reimagining a business process to enabling collaboration between employees using technology, your process transformation can have a significant impact.
Process-First
At the core of any intelligent automation journey, your organization’s unique requirements and processes should be the driving force. Whether your goal is to go paperless or boost specific digital process’ efficiency, closely investigating your processes will produce a better outcome.
Assess your processes as they currently function step-by-step in detail. How do your employees engage with them? You can then focus on bringing the right technology to enable your team to be more efficient and do more with less. Examining your processes is a detailed process. You cannot effectively automate or optimize your processes without understanding how they’re truly working. This will help you determine what modifications and redesign you will need to address. With greater transparency into your operations, you’ll be better prepared to make the right choices when it comes to choosing technology down the road.
Worker Enablement
A sustainable intelligent automation journey relies on happy, engaged workers. Specifically, every percentage increase in employee satisfaction increases a company’s market value by nearly 5%, according to Harvard Business Review. As we’ve discussed, healthy company culture and effective communications with employees can help employee morale. But building a digital work environment that empowers your employees to feel and perform their best is also critical. This concept, known as worker enablement, is vital to keep in mind as you formulate and implement your strategy.
With remote work models’ continued prevalence, there’s no better time to invest in technology that empowers this workforce. While remote workers enjoy benefits like time flexibility and no morning commute, they also face setbacks. They may have difficulty finding the information they need to do their jobs without the proper infrastructure. Additionally, they may lack the appropriate technology to keep them connected with their peers. This may not only inhibit collaboration, but it can leave employees without a sense of connection, which can also affect focus and productivity. Addressing these problems is to your advantage as well as your remote and in-office employees.
Other examples of employee enabling technologies can include:
- Automated notifications that alert workers that it’s time to perform an action
- Single-click actions to accelerate processes for greater employee productivity
- Intelligent document processing (IDP) technology, which uses AI and machine learning to automatically extract, classify, and process structured and unstructured data, turning it into actionable insights and letting your staff focus on high-value tasks instead of error-prone, tedious manual data entry.
- Empowering workers with data-driven performance insights
- Low-code development platforms that let users quickly build applications using drag-and-drop tools and pre-built components, with no advanced coding required.
Whether you’re assessing your intelligent automation strategy or considering technology investments, worker enablement is a valuable element to keep in mind.
For example, ask questions like:
- How can I make my in-office and my remote employees’ jobs more enjoyable and efficient?
- What’s the best way to communicate with my in-office and my remote employees?
- How can I strengthen in-office and remote employees’ connection with each other?
5. Transforming Business Models
As we discussed before, your intelligent automation journey isn’t just about technology. A core component is rethinking and reshaping business models. If your business model is outdated, it doesn’t matter if you have all the hottest new technologies at your fingertips. Problems will arise.
Here are five examples of how businesses have refreshed their business models using technology:
- Using Digital to Extend Business: For example, traditional retailers like Target and even grocery stores still operate under their standard business model. However, they’ve also used digital to offer online shopping experiences through not only their website, but also their app as a convenient option for customers.
- Using Advanced Technology to Create Deeply Personalized Experiences: Amazon has set the standard for a personalized customer experience, in part due to its innovative use of AI, machine learning, and customer data.
- Going Global: Other organizations are beginning to leverage . Digital globalization is the latest phase of globalization driven largely by flows of data and information. Many have successfully transitioned from multinational to global operations using technology and integrated information.
- Serving Convenience and Speed with Technology: McDonald’s has further streamlined the fast-food experience using automated kiosks that have quickly spread to other fast food restaurants as an industry norm.
- New Digital Product Opportunities: Companies that have traditionally offered low-tech products have found success in introducing additional digital products. Others have caught the time and attention of their customers by providing end-to-end digital experiences. For example, an airport authority has introduced an integrated multichannel experience. It gives customers a one-stop-shop for all things air travel, from airplane traffic updates to reservations and shopping coupons.
6. Consider Business Orchestration and Process Orchestration
As your automation journey matures, orchestration will likely become essential, be it business orchestration and process orchestration. Here’s an overview of the two technologies and the value they can bring to your intelligent automation journey that make them worth considering:
Business orchestration connects your entire enterprise’s systems, data, and workflows into a cohesive, intelligent operation. It’s ideal for large-scale transformation, customer experience initiatives, and regulatory compliance.
Process orchestration, on the other hand, focuses on coordinating the individual tasks and endpoints within a specific process. It’s perfect for automating complex workflows like onboarding, order-to-cash, or IT provisioning.
Both are powerful and whether they’re used independently or together, they can ensure your automation efforts are scalable, flexible, and aligned with your business goals.
5 Steps to Get Your Journey Started
Now that we’ve covered the reasons businesses are pursuing intelligent automation journeys, you might be wondering, Where do I start? How do I start? Let’s get into it.
1. Find Your Starting Point
No two intelligent automation journeys will look alike. They are unique to the needs of each business and its customers. That’s why the critical first step of your intelligent automation journey will be determining what that actually means to your organization.
Start by analyzing your business’ current maturity, industry trends, customer feedback, and competition. With this baseline context in mind, you can begin to look inward. Here, you’ll need to answer the big questions, including:
- Why does your organization need to pursue intelligent automation specifically?
- What overarching goals are you trying to achieve?
- Are there any apparent inefficiencies that you want to address?
- Where are we losing out to competition?
These responses will give you a high-level idea of how your organization is operating currently, and what this broad term, “intelligent automation journey,” uniquely means for your business.
Next, it’s time to team up with your employees for an organizational assessment. An organizational assessment will help you zero in on your areas of greatest need in your operations, culture, and processes, so you can create the most prescriptive intelligent automation roadmap possible.
This step doubles as a change management strategy: when you engage your staff in your transformation from the start and show them you value their insights, they’ll be less likely to resist change later.
In practice, this assessment consists of collecting quantitative data from anonymous employee surveys and qualitative data from employee focus groups. Ask questions like:
- How efficient are the processes that you interact with in your role?
- Do you have the proper equipment to perform your job effectively?
- How would you rate the communication across the organization and within your department?
- Do you feel creativity and innovative ideas are embraced and rewarded?
- Are you provided with sufficient training when new processes or tools are introduced?
Next, you must assess the capabilities you already have. Consider how your organization is operating already. Don’t leave a single stone unturned. Examine every available resource that drives your organization. These capabilities can include anything from technology investments to your most valuable assets, your employees. This is where feedback from your organizational assessment will become extra handy!
Understanding how your processes currently work is also extremely helpful at this early stage, as it’ll help you realize areas that need the most help, including inefficiencies you may be completely unaware of. That’s where process and task mining come in:
- Process mining analyzes system event logs to visualize your end-to-end workflows, identify bottlenecks, and uncover inefficiencies.
- Task mining captures user interactions at the desktop level to reveal how individual tasks are performed in real life, not just how they’re supposed to be done.
Together, these two technologies give you a data-driven foundation for your automation strategy. You’ll know exactly where to start, what to fix, and how to measure success.
An intelligent automation journey is more than replacing your current tech with a catchall solution and calling it a day. While implementing new solutions will likely come into play, an intelligent automation journey often means finding new innovative ways to use your current technology investments. Having a clear picture of where you’re at now and defining your expectations will set you off on the right foot in your journey.
2. Build the Business Case
Turning your intelligent automation strategy into a reality requires a rock-solid business case. In this stage, you will start to establish firm objectives and collect essential data. The information that you include will be used as selling points when you seek executive buy-in later.
For starters, here are a few key markers you’ll need to explore:
Metrics
First, determine the value metrics. These numbers will help to demonstrate the value your intelligent automation journey will bring to your organization. Identifying this information is not only helpful in a business case, but it’s a key dataset you’ll need as you implement your strategy and begin to measure results. Factors to cover may include:
- Staff Retention
- Productivity
- Branding
- Customer Experience & Satisfaction Impact
- Conversion
- Revenue
Digital Roadmap
Now it’s time to create a plan of action. Some actions on your roadmap will be short-term, and some will be long-term. The short-term plan will be highly detailed, as it will outline the first steps occurring in the project’s first month. The long-term plan can be broader, but it should schedule checkpoints where you will refer to your set metrics to ensure you’re on track. Additionally, be sure to highlight key milestones along the way to keep a visual focus on the bigger picture goals of your project.
Provide Proof of ROI
Organizations rely on ROI to identify the best way to use a financial resource. However, calculating ROI is no easy task, especially in today’s fast-paced digital world. There are many ways to calculate ROI that depends on your specific goals. Complex as the process may be, ROI is undoubtedly a key confidence-booster for every party involved in the journey.
Another method for measuring your progress is the return on time invested (ROTI). Specifically, ROTI operates under the idea that successful technology investments should help you accomplish more with fewer staff members involved. To find your ROTI, divide your total revenue by the number of employees in your organization.
Identify an Executive Sponsor
When delivering your business case to executives, it can be helpful to have a senior team member on your side who can advocate for you. This individual should be well acquainted and involved with your initiative.
3. Get Buy-In from Executives & Employees
A crucial step after you have a solid strategy and business case is getting your top-level executives on board. To guide your executives in the right direction, focus on the bigger-picture plan, and your “Why.”
This is where your business case will come in handy. Help your executives understand the immense value that intelligent automation can offer your organization.
- Explain your strategy plan and any data backing your decisions.
- Emphasize what specific problems your strategy is designed to solve and what your long-term project entails.
- Share your future vision for your company’s intelligent automation journey.
- Specify how committing to intelligent automation and an agile mindset will serve the company now and for years to come.
Having executives on your side is not only necessary to get your project off the ground running, but it can be helpful during implementation stages, too. When you inevitably hit bumps in the road on your journey, you’ll have an upper-level executive at the ready with the authority to sign off on necessary changes. Additionally, getting buy-in and building enthusiasm from company leaders is a great way to begin building a change-positive company culture that embraces technology.
Involve Your Employees
When you have the executives on your side, it’s time to involve the people behind your intelligent automation journey: your employees. After all, your success ultimately hinges on happy, engaged employees who actually adopt the changes you make. To win your employees over, you need to focus on:
Communicate Your Plan & Personal Impact
You already set the scene by performing your organizational assessment. Now it’s time to clue them in on your intelligent automation journey roadmap. Clearly state the “why” behind your pursuit in ways they can understand. For example, break down the specific problems that make change urgent and any ways this may negatively impact staff members.
Tying issues back to your employees is extremely powerful because the question of “But how will it impact me?” is going to be on everyone’s minds.
The other common fear you will need to address is job security. As you transform your processes and implement new tech, many of your employees’ roles will evolve. Let them know if reskilling or upskilling will be involved and walk them through how that process will work. And don’t forget to help them understand how beneficial growing their skills will be for them both professionally and personally.
Ongoing Communication & Feedback
Don’t forget to communicate effectively and thoroughly at each stage of your journey and post-implementation. And, we mean everyone, all staff, not just the digital leaders in your organization. Everybody must remain on the same page throughout the process. Keeping employees up-to-date on your initiative’s progress won’t just help them feel included and valued. It’ll also keep the topic top-of-mind and progress updates can even boost motivation to continue supporting the change initiative. These updates can come in the form of a dedicated column in your company newsletter or weekly video updates from a company leader.
Additionally, you need to let your employees’ voices be heard. Encourage feedback during and after implementation. This can take multiple different forms:
- Google Forms
- Ask-Me-Anythings where your leadership answers employee-submitted questions in a newsletter column, videos sent to employees, or a webinar series
- Interview a sample group of impacted staff
- Polls
- Dedicate an email address where employees can send questions and feedback
- Remind department leaders and management to regularly check in with their staff and report back to you
4. Select the Right Tools
You’ve assessed your processes. You’ve built a solid strategy and a strong team. Now, it’s tech time. But with the sheer volume of technology vendors, solutions, and tools to choose from, this step can be daunting. How do you find the right tools for your organization?
While there is no “one size fits all” solution for every organization, here are some common technologies that organizations use as a part of their intelligent automation journeys:
-
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Machine Learning
- Intelligent Document Processing
- Hyperautomation
- Low-Code Development
- Content Management
- Business Process Management (BPM)
- Process Mining
- Cloud
- Predictive Analytics
- Workflow
- Customer Communication Management
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
All these tools work together to provide robust business solutions. As you’re exploring your options, be sure to ask yourself:
- How user-friendly is this solution?
- What kind of learning curve have other organizations encountered with this solution? Do we have the resources and budget to meet the resulting training needs sufficiently?
- Would this solution fit our users’ requirements and environment?
- Does this solution have the integrations we need?
5. Be an Agent of Change
Change is difficult. Whether consciously or unconsciously, people are resistant to change. But fostering a healthy, change-positive culture can help. Building and maintaining this culture isn’t something you can coast through. Unfortunately, culture is one of the biggest barriers to digital effectiveness.
If your staff is stuck in the “if it’s not broken, why fix it?” mindset, you’ll need to work to foster a culture that embraces innovation and change. A powerful way to begin this process is to encourage your staff to experiment, challenge the status quo, and fail. Since your transformation is sure to involve plenty of training, you will have ample opportunity to promote this mindset. Then, after training, encourage your staff to look for ways to apply their knowledge. But keep in mind that this mindset shift requires employees to leave their comfort zones. As a result, expect to see gradual change and faster progress in some employees over others. And when you see shining examples of innovation in action, share them with all your employees. They may just get inspired to try new ideas out themselves.
Maintain Perspective
It’s easy to get caught up in the details, which can be exhausting. And while details are imperative, don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. Keep your end vision top of mind and work towards setting your business up for success and growth now and in the future. It’s essential to note that the most successful intelligent automation journeys aren’t just reactive, quick fixes. They’re preemptive investments. This is where the competitive advantage truly lies in the long run.
Start Your Journey Now
Don’t let “intelligent automation” intimidate you. See it as the opportunity that it is rather than a threat. Intelligent automation offers many valuable benefits to your organization and your customers now and into the uncertain future.
If you still feel unsure of where to start or have more questions about intelligent automation, know that we will be there as your consultant to guide you towards your goals. Drop a question or comment in the chat below, we’d love to hear from you.
