By Anil Bhasin, Managing Director & Vice President, UiPath India and South Asia
Technology is continuously evolving, and automation has changed the way we look at our daily work life. Automation faced a global disruption and business leaders now understand the need behind taking away the burden of manual work. However, it is important to understand that automation is not replacing workforces. In fact, it is augmenting how people do their jobs and is resulting in improved services and efficiency.
What we must understand is that automation is a net jobs creator and the demand for automation has created a demand for automation jobs and skills. BFSI, finance & accounting and IT operations have always been some of the key functions that looked for automation solutions to improve their efficiency. Healthcare, retail, SMBs, and manufacturing users are also seeing an increased number of use cases being developed every day to adapt to changing work styles and heavy inflow of work.
In the healthcare sector, automation has helped staff save time on patient data entry, scheduling appointments, billing management, engagement with insurance companies, etc. With automation, several departments can be connected and the turnaround time for communication of reports and findings can be significantly shortened. Patient records and history can be made available in a short span of time. By freeing up time, caregivers can spend more time on patient care. Max healthcare adopted automation to streamline their high volume processes, resulting in accuracy and security of documents. They have been able to minimize manual repetitive work with improved efficiency, staff experience, while minimizing documenting errors.
Meanwhile, with remote working being the norm, financial institutions choose to scale their digital banking efforts and leverage automation to improve customer experience and satisfaction. Federal Bank, for example, wanted to become more efficient, scalable, error free and cost productive with the help of automation. With positive outcomes, the bank ultimately succeeded in adopting automation as a tool to meet their requirements. In short, automation in banks is also helping increase operational efficiency, minimize costs, and speed up compliance needs by automating processes, unstructured data from emails, documents, and forms. With queries and service tickets raised online, bots are helping prioritize tasks by urgency and tasks are being appropriately assigned to employees with minimum confusion.
Historically, technological evolution and advancements especially during global crises have created scope for new roles and functions along with visible improvement in efficiency. Contrary to the fear that plagues people today, we can clearly see how automation is creating job opportunities and a need to provide skilling opportunities both at an institutional as well as an organizational level.
According to the 2021 Office Worker Survey instituted by UiPath, on average, respondents said they waste five hours a week on tasks they think could be automated. In India, 65% of the respondents said they received automation training, and 94% credit it with a boost in job performance. Individuals who come with diverse industry experience are also fitting in well in such roles as they are able to look at a problem from a holistic perspective. They not only understand the technology but are also able to apply years of experience.
Automation has also evolved to become a C-suite priority and a major part of boardroom discussions. At the same time, low code applications require minimal to no coding intervention and has been growing in popularity. It helps place automation as a new layer on top of the IT stack or the existing applications. Citizen developers across sectors are being enabled to build simple automation that can help reduce daily workloads.
With increased success, error-free, and cost-effective use cases, companies are now surging ahead in their digital transformation journey thanks to automation. By automating key tasks that may be monotonous in nature, we are freeing up employees’ time that can be applied towards innovative solutions and strategic priorities, as tasks are being taken away, not people.
