BackIntelligent automation betters man-machine relationship
The power lies in the machine’s strengths and capabilities that are different from—but crucially complementary to—human skills
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Somewhere in the middle of the digital revolution, business leaders started noticing a strange phenomenon. The revolution, as it turned out, wasn’t about technology—it was about people. Although digital seems to be pervading everything, with the global digital economy accounting for 22% of the world’s economy in 2015, up from 15% in 2005, leading companies that place people first will find success in a world that continues to reinvent at an unprecedented rate.
The 2016 Accenture Technology Vision highlights five emerging technology trends shaping the new landscape: intelligent automation, liquid workforce, platform economy, predictable disruption and digital risk. Despite the fact that each trend outlines a technology driver that will impact businesses for years to come, they are tied together by the central theme of people. Companies that empower their people with new skills can fully capitalize on the opportunities technology is creating, enabling new innovations needed to propel their business forward and subsequently succeed in today’s digital age.
Specifically, Accenture views intelligent automation not as a dehumanized version of a science fiction novel in which robots take over the world and artificial intelligence (AI) costs everyone their jobs, but rather a story about people and machines working together. Powered by AI, robots and augmented reality, intelligent automation is the launching pad for new growth and innovation, and companies are beginning to financially back it.
In a companion survey of more than 3,100 business and IT executives worldwide, Accenture found that 70% of survey respondents acknowledge increased AI-related technology investments compared to two years ago, and 55% say that they plan on using machine learning and embedded AI solutions like IPsoft’s Amelia extensively.
By weaving systems, data and people together, intelligent automation is changing the organization, what it does and how it does it. Machines and AI will be the newest recruits to the workforce, bringing new skills to help people do new jobs, reinventing what’s possible and, in turn, becoming the essential new co-worker for the digital age.
As a result, intelligent automation will enable enterprises to innovate and evolve by increasing their agility, reducing the complexity of systems and operations, accelerating their time to market, and giving them the ability to experiment continually with new products and services.
An example of this is German industrial company Siemens, which has automated some of its production lines to the point where they can run unsupervised for several weeks at a time. This may seem like a basic transfer of tasks from man to machine, but for Siemens it is a step towards a larger goal of creating a fully self-organizing factory.
In this environment, machines will largely organize themselves, supply chains will automatically link themselves together, and orders will be directly converted into manufacturing information that is incorporated into the production process. The “lights out" manufacturing plant of Siemens requires 1,150 employees to support it, but they now have different roles, with many now focused on programming, monitoring and machine maintenance.
Intelligent automation is proliferating in various ways across multiple industries to create value for businesses and society alike. Some examples of this include:
• Natural language processing (NLP): Finance companies apply NLP to enhance compliance and fraud prevention by monitoring electronic communications at financial institutions to identify relationships and entities across threads.
• Computer vision: Law enforcement uses computer vision on facial recognition systems to identify or verify a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source.
• Knowledge representation: Healthcare providers use a system to analyse massive amounts of data to extract useful sections, such as doctor names, costs and number of complaints, to create a clean and easy way to find the root cause of declining clinic performance.
• Reasoning and planning: Automated planning and scheduling, typically for execution by autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles, expedites the product journey from warehouse to retail store to household.
It is examples like Siemens or Aloft Hotels, part of the Starwood Hotels chain, which employs a robot butler that can navigate around guests and use elevators, delivering amenities to guest rooms in lieu of actual humans, which exemplifies intelligent automation’s ability to fundamentally change traditional ways of operating for both businesses and people.
The power lies in the machine’s strengths and capabilities that are different from—but crucially complementary to—human skills. This new, more productive relationship between people and machines will be a key enabler of the changes businesses must make to keep pace with and compete in the new digital economy.
The author is global managing director (technology R&D) at Accenture Plc.
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