Background
At the recent U.S. Automation Summit, ISG conducted a real-time “swarm study”, in partnership with Unanimous AI. The swarm combined the knowledge and intuition of members with artificial swarm intelligence algorithms in order to derive confidence/conviction profiles for each participant.
Executive Summary
Organizational resistance to automation is expected to be the most significant challenge to adoption over the next three years. With less than one-quarter of firms projected to make automation a board-level priority in 2019, it is easy to understand the swarm’s view that strong executive support, along with having a well-defined strategic roadmap, is critical to a successful automation strategy over the near-term.
The swarm was in strong agreement that the primary goal of automating employees tasks over the next three years will be to improve productivity, and the selection of which processes to automate is most likely to be determined by how many hours can be returned to the business as a result of the automation. Accordingly, it is anticipated that return-on-investment (ROI) will be measured by improved productivity and speed. The swarm estimates that automation has the potential to repatriate between 10% and 25% of offshore work during the next three years.
As automation becomes more widespread, it is imperative that Centers of Excellence (CoE) be able to define the best operating model, especially since firms are expected to take full responsibility for both building and supporting bots in-house. Here, cognitive systems are expected to play a particularly important role in automating business decisions; consequently, cognitive/artificial intelligence skillsets are forecast to be in great demand to build, support, and maintain automation operations.
Click on the questions below to view the results.
Automation Strategy
Q1: What percentage of firms will make automation a board-level priority in 2019?
Q2: What’s MOST important to ensure an automation strategy is successful?
Q3: Over the next three years, the GREATEST challenge to automation will be:
Measuring Automation Results
Q4: Over the next three years, automation ROI will MOSTLY be calculated using:
Q5: When deciding which processes to automate, MOST important will be:
Automation and the Workforce
Q6: In terms of jobs, what will be the PRIMARY goal over the next three years.
Q7: In 2019, the automation skillset MOST in-demand will be:
Automation Operating Model
Q8: It will be MOST IMPORTANT for an automation Center of Excellence to:
Automation Delivery Model
Q10: Over the next three years, the model firms will use MOST OFTEN for building and supporting bots is
Q11: Over next three years, automation will repatriate what percentage of offshore work?
Automation Technology
Q12: In 2019, cognitive systems that ___ will see the MOST demand.
Q13: In 2019, the GREATEST challenge to deploying cognitive will be:
