#88 Process and Automation Trends 2024 w/ The Automation Guys

Welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. So as always, I'm here with Arno.

Hello, Arno.

Hey, Sascha.

So yeah, another week, another episode. It's crazy, it's already end of October nearly, so going really, really fast towards the end of the year. And yeah, it would be really cool to have a chat about what's coming up in 2024. So yeah, today we will discuss a few potential trends we see for 2024 when it comes to process and automation. So, uh, I don't know, are you up for it?

Yeah, I mean, obviously there's some, some top topics, high-level topics we can touch on, um, and some, some sort of, I guess, 5 trends that, that we want to, um, just highlight as, as the top ones that we feel is going to be prominent next year. Uh, so this is really a continuation on you know, the momentum we've seen in 2023 anyway. And I guess it's kind of going back since the sort of start of the pandemic. I think the areas within site process automation, automation in general, has evolved a lot. I think there's been quite a big drive for organizations to adopt technology, especially automation technology. You know, we talk about various of those on these podcasts. Obviously, the topical one at the minute is, you know, undoubtedly AI, machine learning, you know, large language models, the explosion with ChatGPT. You know, so I think that's what a kind of topical a sort of area of automation that we've seen almost exploding in 2023. I think it's fair to say that it is, that there's a degree of sort of hype that's dying down slightly as people try to understand what the use cases for—

Absolutely.

—progressive technologies. But I would say the key point still is, you know, if, you know, kind of looking at the analyst reports is still hyperautomation. You know, that, that's just a sort of a combination of, of multiple of, of these automation technologies that obviously aim to push, you know, the limits of what we can do with automation. And, and, you know, and, and that's taking things like AI that I've just mentioned, integrating that with RPA, which is robotic process automation. If you haven't heard that term before, RPA is essentially software bots, and software bots can be trained to mimic human actions, human behaviors to, you know, complete some tasks on behalf of humans very fast, very accurate. So RPA is obviously quite a, you know, a well-embedded technology now with inside, I would say, the hyper automation space. Intelligent document processing. You know, organizations generates a lot of documents. And, you know, you know, within finance, for example, even with inside departments, you know, HR departments. So I think that's, that's, that's still quite a big topic. There's a lot of vendors out there that actually commoditize this IDP a lot where they provide you with some intelligent document processing capabilities. And, you know, I, I think, I think what, what, what this is trying to do is, is, is really trying to kind of create an umbrella where businesses can automate as, as, as many business processes as possible, you know, and, and to also make businesses efficient and adaptive and, and more profitable and, you know, and, and more desirable for their customers, you know. And of course, underneath all of the hyperautomation, if we, if we sort of open that up and we sort of look at the fundamentals and I guess some of the foundations, business process management is still in there. You know, let's not write off the fact that workflow automation, case management, these tools that allows you to model and optimize and monitor business processes, you know, they, they, they still in there, you know, and I guess, you know, with InsightHub, hyperautomation, if you wanna get going, and you don't want to sort of throw yourself, you know, with inside the AI space because you're still using Excel spreadsheets, then, you know, BPM is still a sort of go-to for those kind of processes that you want to automate, you want to orchestrate, you want to get rid of Excel being sent across your business, you want to use digital forms, you want to be able to measure process performance. So, you know, let's not forget BPM is still part of that mix. And of course, you know, hand in hand with that, which is more sort of, I guess, a bit more closer to the implementation of these things is, you know, the concept of low and no-code. You know, we live in a world where we always hear people say, well, we want to do more with less. Well, this is the enabler for that. You know, gone are the days where somebody gives you a requirement and you have to go and ask a professional developer, write some code for you to actually bring that to life. You know, that these low and no-code development platforms, which people are becoming really accustomed to and so used to, it's almost sort of blurred the lines now of, you know, we want the requirement implemented, you know, we want to have that in a hyper agile sort of fashion. And the expectation is there that that's quick, right? So again, that's sort of a fundamental. And then of course, the other bits that, and again, this is foundational, but it underpins connectivity between the various systems, APIs, we talk about those things. They still get in the picture. Absolutely. So it's all layering and of course analytics monitoring, you know, it's all in there.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's a lot in there. Definitely.

So I think we're acting that sort of hyper automation topic. Yeah. For me, that's sort of the number one trend and move forward into 2024, possibly beyond that as well.

You know, absolutely beyond that. Yeah. Exactly.

As some of the newer technology sort of additions to that becomes a bit more mainstream. Yeah, exactly.

So it becomes mainstream. And then when you look back, this term is already, I think, nearly like 3, 4 years old when it came out first time. But when it comes to the adoption, sure, every company, every big enterprise or larger company has already tried out different things when it comes to hyperautomation, a bit of AI, a bit of RPA, maybe a bit of IDP, that kind of stuff. But it is a trend going forward because the adoption, when you look across everything, is still really, really small. So obviously everyone tried it but not really used it excessively across the businesses and in all departments. And this is why it's still still a trend topic. And as you mentioned, probably for the next years to come, because now, yeah, people can use it more. So it has developed better. And then obviously the AI components around it, the technologies as part of automation, they have evolved and makes it much, much easier. And that brings me as well to the second sort of hype topic for next year. You touched on that lightly, is the low-code and no-code thing, platforms out there, they have evolved as well. So this is why, why you mentioned that earlier, was the hyperautomation as a foundation. These platforms are incredible and they have developed immensely over the last couple of years. So using AI 2 years ago, yeah, you could do some stuff with it fairly, fairly easily in some use cases, but now what you can get out of AI machine machine learning on a click of a button is just ridiculous. And so, so now thousands of documents can be processed so much faster with the power of AI. 2 years, 3 years ago, yeah, you had maybe an accuracy of 80%, maybe 90%. Now accuracy and detection of content and, and things when it comes to IDP, for example, is so quick. And you don't have to be a machine learning engineer, data engineer to do that kind of stuff. So yeah, low-code, no-code platforms are absolutely a hype next year still. Yeah, because, yeah, so everyone is just starting about it. And I think generally enterprises may be starting with these new technologies first, then smaller companies using it. So it's all based on budget and money available, I guess, in these organizations. But nowadays these technologies can be picked up by any size of business really. The small business in East London can just pick it up and build applications with low-code and no-code, put some AI in it, do a bit of document processing. So this is really something which increasingly gets accessible for everyone. And this is sort of the democratization of automation really, which we see more and more of in 2024. And it is really just the beginning, which is exciting. Yeah, so basically you can get going without being a high-code developer. So lots of different personnel can really design and implement automation solutions, and this is incredible. Yeah, so that's definitely what is coming up. So yeah, we will talk about low-code and no-code a lot here because it's a really, really Great, great topic. Yeah, we see pretty much all the big vendors out there. A couple of years ago, they were concentrating on case management, business process management. They put all the securities in these platforms. They already made it very, very easy to, to, to develop really, really powerful enterprise solutions. But exactly that now gets easier and easier within these platforms. These platforms cheaper and cheaper. So yeah, it's a good time to jump on it and try it out. And I think there is a platform for any kind of budget available. Certainly. All right. Yeah. So that brings us also to the next topic, AI-driven document processing. Do you want to jump a bit more in depth in it?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I touched a bit on it earlier, but obviously AI is becoming a bit more sort of mainstream now, a bit more prominent. We are seeing even in some of the conversations we're having, if there are seemingly impossible, you know, activities or tasks or solutions that you know, to, to problems. You know, people say, well, you know, can't we do that with AI? You know, so that was, that was sort of inconceivable a couple of years ago. So it's, it's even with, with some of the people that we talk to, they, they know that those solutions are out there. And, and of course, you know, AI is, is, is very useful to, to analyze existing datasets and, and looking at historic data because of course there's, there's gonna be vast amounts of data that, that organizations some organizations have got, potentially allowing you to exploit, you know, very, very, you know, or extract rather really beneficial elements out of that where you can create automations, you know, but based, based on your, your actual datasets itself. And again, you know, that, that's just by kind of analyzing what you've done in the past to predict, you know, certain things that is repetitive. For example, if you have, for instance, contracts that you use and you need to, you know, do assessments on these contracts, first assessments, you need to review them. You can look back at ones that are good contracts and highlight ones that are bad contracts. And so that's a perfect use case for AI. I'm looking at your data, I'm actually looking at those historic documents, and that in turn sort of increases efficiency within your business, you know, and accuracy as well, because the AI would spot things that potentially humans can't spot, you know, and of course it could, you know, in context of intelligent document processing, it can actually, you know, look at vast amounts of documents and, you know, vast amounts of, and provide you vast amounts of sort of almost like bandwidth to be able to do these things. And that makes sense. Results in cost savings inside your business and you could free up resources, you know, that are potentially quite expensive to do these repetitive tasks. So again, you know, it is sort of just bringing automation, sensible automation into your business where you rely on previous ways and previous sort of data, datasets that's there that you've done work already. And you could use that thing to your advantage to actually create models, AI models to actually save your costs, to help you to make better decisions, help you to improve compliance, help you to improve customer experience, give you better data insights. You know, what is my data telling me? Reducing the need for sort of manual work So, you know, so this list is seemingly endless, but it's just all of these, these, these, these benefits that fall out of adoption. And, you know, and I think in 2024 that this is still going to grow, you know, not, not just AI in context of intelligent document processing, but also what is known as intelligent business operations. You know, by looking at the past, you know, let's, let's, let's use that as a baseline for making some predictions to extract some elements of operations that we could potentially, you know, replicate them inside our AI model and the balance, focus on the balance of that, you know, so then deploy our resources to really go to work on, you know, what's left. And then that would kind of, if you go to work on that, you know, that will give you that sort of competitive edge. so, you know, I, I, I think very, very exciting one, this one. Um, you know, we, people talk about data-driven decisions, data-driven outcomes, and I, I think this, this is still, again, with inside the context of hyperautomation, this is, this is still gonna, um, very prominent, uh, probably, you know, beyond, um, 100%. Yeah. 24, 26. As AI becomes more accessible to them.

Very cool. So yeah, over the last couple of years, especially post-pandemic, what we have noticed, a big change in how we work.

Lots of hybrid and remote working setups are now sort of the standard.

But that brings us to another challenge we probably have to focus on more and more in the coming years.

So how do we really make sure remote workers, hybrid workers, office workers work in the best possible, with the best possible outcome, right? So nowadays, of course, especially if you're a larger organization, you don't necessarily know if your workforce is the most productive, really. Sure, there are situations, there's nothing what you can do about remote work, but is it really productive?

Is it contributing to the company goals? How can we manage our offices in the best way?

How can we spread work if people are not sitting together all the time. And we learned a lot from that during the pandemic. Suddenly, business process management, workflow, task management, case management solutions, or business who had these solutions in place already, they cope much, much better with the situation. Because it doesn't really matter if people sitting at home or in the office, they have access to the information, they can process the documents, they can share the tasks, etc., etc. So this will increase increasingly be more important to manage that as effectively as possible.

So therefore, yeah, we will see more tools, more, yeah, definitely more technology out there to efficiently do the collaboration across the workforce, task management, and of course the monitoring of it all. So if everyone is working away wherever. Is everyone—

what is everyone doing during the day? How can we monitor and how can we maybe, yeah, make sure the work is done in the right volume depending on what kind of projects we have and commitments we made to others? Yeah, so that's a huge thing. So it's not necessarily about monitoring, so more like the Big Brother kind of thing, but it's really about seeing if remote workers and hybrid workers, colleagues, are just getting to the right outcome the company needs, we all need. So yeah, that will be a big, big thing coming up. So we all, yeah, realize it's not going back to normal. It's not like we sit in the office all going forward. Lots of companies like that, but the truth is it is changing. And yeah, so we need more and more good answers to that.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is a big focus. And it sort of nicely brings me to one of the next trends that we believe will, that we'll see sort of grow in 2024. And that's sustainable and what's called ethical automation. So obviously with all the noise about AI and you talk about homeworking, impacts on the environment. So, you know, it's, it, there is a consciousness that, that, that we have to shift more and more towards sustainability. And, you know, there's a lot more ethical considerations to look at, you know, as businesses adopt and embrace automation solutions within their operations. You know, that, that's environmentally friendly, that, that's very transparent, for example, for. And, and also, you know, consider, you know, job roles and, and any displacements that automation— yeah, huge. That's huge. Provide. Yeah. And, you know, and, and again, it's not, it's not all only about energy efficiency, um, but, you know, like I mentioned earlier, it's, it's also the implications of AI and, you know, the, the sort of broader, um, social impacts that, that would bring. To, you know, to the workplace or to people. And, you know, I think the environmental impact, like I said, you know, sustainability, obviously people are moving to the cloud, so the cloud, a lot of the data centers, AWS, Microsoft, so that's zero carbon. So it's obviously offset a lot of their carbon. So again, you know, that, that is still a talking point, you know, especially when you look at cloud services that provides infrastructure for a lot of vendors, for a lot of automation solution providers, you know, sustainability and sort of kind of just looking at, you know, if you look at reduced traveling and commuting, you touched on remote working, Sascha Cutura. You know, I don't see things like virtual meetings disappear. You know, I think hybrid working is here to stay, whether people will go into the office or not. That brings a big, you know, that's a big impact in terms of, you know, carbon emissions, etc. You know, people are going to offices and driving there. So, you know, so again, I think it is here to stay from that perspective. You know, if we look at, again, if I touch on sort of ethical AI and decision-making, and again, this is all about addressing the importance of, you know, building ethics into AI algorithms and decision-making processes, trying to remove biases, discrimination, for example. You know, again, from a sort of an ethics perspective, you know, if you look at sort of compliance and regulations, you know, again, you know, when it's, you know, automations that we're bringing to the market, you know, that does this sort of adhere to some of the regulatory requirements. you know, from an ethical perspective as well. And I know there's various sort of industries and various standards, but again, you know, that will be a talking point somewhere, you know, when you look at automation, just to make sure that, you know, whatever you do is, you know, within acceptable ethical standards.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it will be big, what people are concerned, isn't it?

Yeah. Right governance is in place. For example. So yeah, I think, you know, incorporating sustainability and obviously ethics into business process automation is, you know, it's not only responsible, but it also provides kind of positive long-term impact on the organization's reputation, for example, competitiveness, staff retention, things like that. So, you know, so I think it's essential that this one stays on the list as well. So we can actually look at the impacts of what automation brings to society as a whole.

Yeah, very important. Yeah, so that's what we think is on the trends list for 2024. There are obviously lots of other topics which are important, but we think, yeah, this is the top 5. And obviously, covers a lot. So there's, as you mentioned earlier on, some of those are like big umbrella kind of topics and lots of subtopics on those. Yeah, so let us know what you think about our top 5 trends in the feedback section or reach out to us on social. We'll be really interested to hear your thoughts on those and Yeah, we will cover plenty of episodes around these top trends as well then in 2024 to dive a bit deeper into those areas. Yeah, and then these specific areas you can also look at more hands-on in our The Automation Guys community. Yeah, go to theautomationguys.net and sign up to the community and you can get more and more info on those topics and you can collaborate and exchange ideas with like-minded professionals. So check that out, theautomationguys.net. And yeah, we will be back next week again. So as usual, and then yeah, we will talk more about process and automation. And until then, let's automate it.