Automation 4.0 - Answer to Future Ready Transformation?

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill. Global Economic scenario worsened in 2020 which made businesses across industries grappling with uncertainties. As 2020 progressed, anxiety grew around second wave of the outbreak and since January 2021, 2nd wave has made this anxiety a reality and the world has moved into a deep recession. In fact, this pandemic is the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Highest impact of this pandemic is for enterprises who have been exposed with severe business continuity and survival-related challenges that plague legacy business models relying heavily on manual operations.

Fortunately – “The New Normal” way of Human lives, society, economy, and industries has fuelled the “Digital Transformation” story. Enterprises have been forced to transform and modernize their portfolios to enhance user experience and derive more value out of existing applications as they transcend the digital maturity curve. (Application modernization is the key to all digital transformations)

With the outbreak of COVID-19, it became even more important for enterprises to migrate their workloads to the cloud to ensure business continuity and support a remote working environment – as a first step towards digital transformation journey, which has forced a greater need to develop a sustainable Automation strategy for C- suite executives as their digital transformation outcomes have become more and more business oriented.

Pandemic has acted as a Catalyst in making Automation a strategic priority and enterprises have realized the importance of automation for ensuring business resilience, agility, and growth.

Like most business applications, Automation platforms (RPA Platforms) were traditionally built for on-premises deployments, as majority of automations involved desktop-based applications (RPA 1.0). However, as cloud-based applications gained traction, number of business applications moved to the cloud.

Taking a cue, RPA deployments on cloud also began to witness higher traction and the adoption is increasingly driven by factors beyond cost savings - rather higher focus on improvement of Operational Efficiencies and Enhancement of Customer Experience. RPA 2.0 which is mostly unattended Bots quickly moved to Autonomous mode with RPA 3.0 and now towards Intelligent Automation (RPA 4.0 – AI and Cognitive powered) which expands the scope to automate end-to-end processes and drive business outcomes & accelerates the scaling up of Automation initiatives.

Automation 4.0/Intelligent Automation promises to be a heart of future ready transformation with three important outlooks for 2021-22:

Amplified Demand: With beginning of recovery, Amplified demand is expected to be consummated at a faster pace resulting in accelerated deployments, which demands the need to step up from “Task Oriented Automation” to “Process Oriented Automation” driving the demand for a holistic automation solution comprising RPA, IDP, IVA, BPM and process mining or an orchestration platform which can cater to multiple Automation applications in a single console.

Downward pricing Pressure: Intelligent Automation has changed the Automation supplier landscape and is accelerating the “Democratization of Automation” and driving the availability of unlimited usage-based pricing models to exert downward pricing pressure as enterprises struggling due to the pandemic are asking for flexible and progressive pricing options with smaller upfront outlays.

Mobility:Automation 4.0 is increasingly becoming SaaS model which enable easier accessibility, lower TCO and reduced costs as well as human efforts and with several enterprises looking to continue with remote working model – demand for intelligent automation on SaaS is expected to rise further.