By Neelesh Kripalani, Chief Technology Officer, Clover Infotech
Post-pandemic, automation has been making big waves across the globe in transforming businesses and making a significant impact on the organisation’s growth and development cycle. Automation trends such as intelligent automation, hyper-automation, chatbots, etc. are being extensively used by businesses to process huge volumes of data, automate business operations, and make them faster and more efficient. Changing customer needs have led enterprises to double down on their delivery efforts — with a renewed focus on operational efficiency, productivity, and resilience.
A recent Deloitte report states that 53% of organizations have already started implementing robotic process automation (RPA). Furthermore, Gartner forecasts that, by 2024, hyper-automation will allow organisations to lower operational costs by 30 percent. By 2025, the market for hyper-automation software will hit nearly $860 billion.
The need for enterprises today is agility but most organisations fail to achieve it due to legacy technology infrastructure. Innovation in automation will enable organisations to reuse their existing infrastructure to adapt to changing customer demands and help them to gain customer loyalty in a cost-effective manner.
Here are top 5 trends in automation to look out for in 2023:
1. Low-Code & No-Code Platforms
Low-code and no-code platforms use visual interfaces to enable users to develop their own business solutions without extensive coding knowledge. Business users have praised low-code platforms as it is easy to adopt and learn to create needed solutions within days without having to code or know programming languages. Platform code automation has enabled market leaders to introduce low-code and no-code platforms in their product line-ups as they see significant growth potential in adoption by industries worldwide in 2023.
2. Collaborative Robots (cobots)
Collaborative robots a.k.a. cobots are machines that interact side-by-side with humans in a shared professional environment. These cobots can include machinery for heavyweights in warehouses bots in assembly lines to bots used for metal cutting. Cobots are known to quickly adapt to new tasks, learn from repetition and pattern recognition, and optimize workflows. Since cobots exist in a shared environment and do not replace human labor, the demand for cobots is rising in the manufacturing industry and will be in trend in the coming years.
3. Security Automation
Data security has been one of the top priorities for CIOs across industries. Security leaders are designing new ways to create robust and resilient frameworks for their organizations. Many information security OEMs have introduced automated security – 24×7 security that does not need any human intervention, using AI and ML to keep a constant watch on the data environment. It also uses predefined algorithms to detect and address cyber threats. Security mesh has been in constant demand since the pandemic when organisations and security leaders want to embrace cybersecurity mesh wherein disparate security services can be integrated into a single flexible framework.
Gartner states that by 2024, organizations adopting the above architecture will reduce the financial impact of security incidents by an average of 90 percent. However, to succeed, they must manage APIs, connections, and automation bots from a single administration interface.
4. Smart Devices at Workplace
Hybrid working models have bridged the gap between technologies and devices used in personal and professional environments. People working from home have become accustomed to smart devices and have found them to be useful and productive in many ways. These smart devices will find their way into their workplace too, given their ability to complete certain tasks efficiently. Organizations are cognizant of the potential of smart devices and are working towards introducing them to the workplace to create a collaborative environment between the devices and the people to attain more efficiency. Voice-activated smart devices can be used for tasks such as managing schedules, setting reminders, making calls, and even helping with readouts.
5. Predictive Maintenance
The manufacturing industry has been using predictive maintenance (PdM) technology to identify anomalies in processes and machines to fix them proactively. PdM examines your current and past data from connected machinery and applications to identify changes in patterns and suggest remedies before they get out of control. This technology has been in trend in recent years in the IoT space where automation of device maintenance has reduced potential cost implications to the organization due to breakdowns or downtime.
According to Gartner, by 2026, 60 percent of IoT-enabled predictive maintenance solutions will be delivered as part of enterprise asset management products, up from 15 percent in 2021.
Conclusion
2023 will be a year of enterprise-wide automation. Shortage of talent, soaring talent costs, and competition will drive organisation towards automating processes and reducing dependency on the human workforce. Automation will also help the talent pool to work on more productive tasks, fuelling career and skill growth, while reducing work burnout due to repetitive and redundant tasks. In and beyond 2023, we expect to see increased adoption of innovative automation solutions by organizations worldwide to enhance production, manage supply chain, optimise operations, and deliver rich and omni-channel customer experience.