How intelligent automation will change the way we work

Automation in the workplace is nothing new — organizations have used it for centuries, points out Rajendra Prasad, global automation lead at Accenture and co-author of The Automation Advantage. In recent decades, companies have flocked to robotic process automation (RPA) as a way to streamline operations, reduce errors, and save money by automating routine business tasks.

Now organizations are turning to intelligent automation to automate key business processes to boost revenues, operate more efficiently, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Intelligent automation is a smarter version of RPA that makes use of machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive technologies such as natural language processing to handle more complex processes, guide better business decisions, and shed light on new opportunities, said Prasad.

For example, Newsweek has automated many aspects of managing its presence on social media, a crucial channel for broadening its reach and reputation, said Mark Muir, head of social media at the news magazine. Newsweek staffers used to manage every aspect of its social media postings manually, which involved manually selecting and sharing each new story to its social pages, figuring out what content to recycle, and testing different strategies. By moving to a more automated approach, the company now spends much less time on these processes.

“We use Echobox’s automation to help determine which content should be shared to our social media and to optimize how and when it is posted so that the largest possible audience will see it,” Muir said. “Automating in this way has created more time for us to focus on our readers and find new ways to engage our audience.”

Industry watchers predict that intelligent automation will usher in a workplace where AI not only frees up human workers’ time for more creative work but also helps them set strategies and drive innovation. Most companies are not fully there yet but do have numerous opportunities for business process automation throughout the organization.

Business processes that are ripe for automation

Ravi Vasantraj, global delivery head at IT services provider Mphasis, cites several characteristics that make business processes good candidates for automation:

• Processes that deal with structured, digital or non-digital data having definitive steps
• Processes with seasonal spikes that can’t be fulfilled by a manual workforce, such as policy renewals, premium adjustments, claims payments in insurance, and so on
• Processes with stringent service level agreements that need quick turnarounds, such as transactions posting, order fulfillment, etc.

Many companies are automating contract management, added Doug Barbin, managing principal and chief growth officer at Schellman, a provider of attestation and compliance services. “If you consider all the steps needed to draft, send, redline, and execute contracts via email, the use of technology to manage the content, coordinate change approval, and automate the signing process, the savings in time and reduction of errors is significant,” he said.

Beyond contracts, anything that reduces manual interaction for sales is an opportunity. For example, companies are providing chatbots to automate the ability to answer key questions and connect prospects to sales, according to Barbin.

UMC, a mechanical services contractor in Seattle, has automated many of its sales processes, said Bob Frey, director of sales operations. “We’ve automated various sales stages so we can track sales through our pipelines,” he said. “We are able to track what stages the different sales are in. We do this using Unanet CRM by Cosential that’s designed specifically for the construction industry.”

Schellman’s Barbin cites security as another area where automation is making inroads. “In cybersecurity, the mundane often resides in compliance and the need to test controls in an increasingly complex environment,” he said. “There is an entire segment of compliance automation tools that are being built to collect data and perform initial analysis before triaging and passing to [a human] assessor.”

In addition, more organizations are automating the procure-to-pay process in finance and the hire-to-retire process in human resources, said Wayne Butterfield, global lead for intelligent automation solutions at ISG (Information Services Group), a research and advisory firm.

“There are large numbers of tasks in every organization across just about every function that can be automated,” he said. “The question is: What is the technology needed to automate them, and does it make sense from a value realization perspective?”

The contact center is a huge opportunity, not only because of the large number of people completing similar activities with every contact but because of the positive impact it can have on customer experience and agent efficiency, Butterfield said. For example, companies can use automated virtual agents to handle the more routine customer requests, such as balance inquiries, bill payment, or change of address requests. This enables human agents to handle the more complicated customer inquiries that require creative problem solving. Handing these routine tasks off to automated virtual agents shortens the time it takes to resolve customer issues.

Where intelligent automation is taking us

In coming years, the architecture of work will change and become more event-driven, with business processes controlled with intelligent automation and work broken down into discrete tasks that are performed via automation, assigned to a worker, or interactively executed between a robot assistant and a worker, said IDC’s Fleming.

“There will be far fewer task workers using enterprise applications on a constant basis; task work will increasingly be delivered to workers via automation,” she said. “Employees will spend more time digitally enabling themselves by learning how to develop using low-code tools. And employees will spend more time planning, proactively identifying and resolving problems, making decisions, creating, etc. — in other words, performing knowledge work and/or creative work.”

Prasad said that in the years to come, there will be a huge opportunity for automation to be viewed as an indispensable co-worker with a vital role to play in companies’ successes by bringing in opportunities to reinvent individual processes, transform customer and employee experiences, and drive revenue growth.

“Intelligent automation promises to usher in a new era in business, one where companies are more efficient and effective than ever before and able to meet the needs of customers, employees, and society in new and powerful ways,” he said.

Automation pitfalls to watch out for

As organizations automate their business processes, there are many potential hazards to avoid.

“The main one is ignoring your people and underestimating that,” Butterfield said. “Although the outcome is driven by using a technology, everything up to the actual automation of a process is generally very people-focused. A lack of change management will unfortunately cause many issues in the long term. Organizations need to keep their people aligned with their overall goals.”

Security, mainly authentication, is also a key concern, Barbin said. “Any automation, API [application programming interface] or other, requires some means to pass access credentials,” he said. “If the systems that automate and contain those credentials are compromised, access to the connected systems could be too.” To help minimize that risk, Barbin suggests using SAML 2.0 and other technologies that take stored passwords out of the systems.

Another pitfall is selecting only one technology as the automation tool of choice. Typically organizations need multiple technologies to get the best results, said Maureen Fleming, program vice president for intelligent process automation research at IDC.

And when companies decide to automate a business process previously carried out by a person or a team of people, it’s natural to receive some pushback, Newsweek’s Muir said. “Some of our journalists had initially struggled with the idea of letting an algorithm make choices that were previously weighed up and decided by a human,” he said. “There can be a bit of fear around AI and algorithms and a perceived lack of control when processes are suddenly automated.”

Organizations also need to establish clear strategies for business process automation, according to Vasantraj. “Automating the processes without understanding the ROI [return on investment] could lead to business loss, or automations built with multiple user interventions may not yield any benefit at all,” he said.

Take it slow, plan carefully, and listen to your people

Scaling intelligent automation is one of the biggest challenges for organizations, said Accenture’s Prasad. Therefore, it’s crucial that companies be clear about the strategic intent behind this initiative from the outset and ensure that it’s embedded into their entire modernization journeys, from cloud adoption to data-led transformation.

“Intelligent automation is not a race to be the first to implement the latest technology,” he said. “Success depends on understanding people’s needs, introducing new technologies in a way that is helpful and involves minimal disruption, and addressing issues related to new skills, roles, and job content.”

In other words, focusing on people is just as important as focusing on technology, Prasad said. Investments in intelligent automation must be “people first” — designed to elevate human strengths and supported by investments in skills, change management, experience, organization, and culture.

Butterfield agreed that strategic thinking is critical. “My advice would be to start small and think strategically,” he said. “Understand the shape and type of problems you are trying to automate or improve before you move to a technology solution. Work with your people, and ensure you use their tribal knowledge to understand why they do something.”

However, Butterfield cautions that organizations should avoid relying on people’s opinions on how long things take and how many actions they are able to complete in a given timeframe. “Such reliance often causes your business cases to be inaccurate, as they include the agent’s local management bias versus hard data and facts,” he said.

Muir’s advice is to let the results speak for themselves. Once an organization has introduced AI and automation to a process, it should let any time gains and increases in performance be key factors in objectively determining whether the project was a success. “In our experience, using Echobox proved the quantifiable value of automation to our organization, which made it easier for our teams to embrace it,” he said.

“Another piece of advice would be to find a balance that works for your team or your business when it comes to how much automation you use,” Muir said. For businesses that want to dip their toes into automation but are hesitant to automate 100% of their processes and relinquish manual control, there are often ways to just partially automate tasks, he added. “Take a realistic look at where you’re regularly spending time and talent on repetitive, manual tasks and explore how you can automate those parts of your workday.”

How workers can keep pace with automation

Rather than push back, employees should embrace automation and the opportunities it creates for them to provide high-value contributions versus management of administrative tasks, Barbin said.

“For security operations, for instance, leveraging automation allows those watching the networks for attackers to focus on high-priority threats and incidents, keeping up with a faster-moving landscape,” he said. “For compliance, they can move from managing a single US framework, [such as] SOC 2, to global compliance requirements, all from a single management plane.”

IDC’s Fleming noted that most organizations try to upskill and shift workers into new roles when their current roles are automated. They also consolidate new responsibilities into an existing role. And they tend to hire internal candidates for open jobs.  “When offered an opportunity to learn how to develop for automation, process improvement, etc., employees should embrace that opportunity,” she said. “Employees should look for internal upskilling programs as well as external ones.”

Newsweek’s Muir agreed that employees need to remain open to learning about new technologies and keep an open mind about how they can be leveraged. “Technology changes fast, and the tools and systems we use today may not be the same ones five years from now,” he said.

https://www.computerworld.com/

Recession in the US may cool off attrition in IT sector along with revenues

After two years of bumper profits and mind-boggling salary hikes, TCS, Infosys, Wipro and other Indian IT companies are treading on a cautious path as wages and a likely slowdown in demand add to margin woes. However, an economic slowdown in the US might not be all that bad for India IT majors. Experts believe that a potential slowdown could have a positive effect on spitballing wage costs and attrition.

A rapid shift towards digitalisation due to the Covid pandemic in the last two years proved to be a big boon for the Indian IT sector. Giants like TCS, Infosys and Wipro rely predominantly on the US and European markets, which contribute to 80-90% of their revenues.

Recession and high attrition rates – a double whammy for IT majors

Now, with talks of recession in the US and Europe gaining momentum, these IT companies are already under stress. The stress due to economic slowdown in the US and Europe has reflected in the FY23 earnings guidance of these IT companies.

However, an economic slowdown in the US might not be all that bad for India IT majors. Slower revenue growth could curb wage hikes and slow down attrition too, say experts.

“Indian IT companies source a lion’s share of their revenue from the US and Europe. Both these geographies face looming macro pressures in the form of one of the highest inflationary pressures and a slowdown in GDP growth,” said a Motilal Oswal report.

After clocking 19% revenue growth in FY22, the Indian IT sector is headed for two years of moderation, according to a Crisil report.

“Revenue growth is expected to moderate to 12-13% this fiscal and 9-10% in the next, [due to] an expected tightening in corporate capital spends because of inflationary headwinds,” the report stated.

“An economic slowdown in the US and EU could prove to be the inflection point for a cool down in wage hikes and attrition rates as well,” Dhananjay Sinha, head of strategy research and chief economist at JM Financial, told Business Insider India.

Attrition levels remain elevated – another source of margin stress

With attrition levels remaining elevated – Infosys is the worst affected with an attrition rate of 28.4% in Q1 FY23, research firms suggest that the margins will remain stressed, too.

“The companies had reduced their margin guidance at the start of FY23, but we believe continued pressure due to elevated attrition levels is likely to result in margins dropping near the lower end of guidance,” stated a report by ICICI Securities.

Wage hikes and attrition rates could simmer down come December

Sinha explained that wage hikes and attrition rates could simultaneously simmer down by the December quarter this year. The cool down in wages across the IT sector could also help solve the attrition headache for IT companies, he said. With startups facing funding crunch, too, there could be fewer exit routes for IT executives.

Amongst the industry, Sinha said that Infosys could lead the pack as its decision to cut variable pay to 70% has shown it is ready to control costs. Media reports suggested that Wipro delayed payouts for certain employee categories, suggesting that companies are beginning to feel the pressure.

However, in contrast, TCS rolled out 100% variable pay days after Infosys.

An economic slowdown in the US is already showing signs of spillover in the Big Tech revenues – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, the world’s top cloud platforms, reported a 7% decline in revenue.

This could have a direct impact on TCS, Infosys and Wipro – according to media reports, the revenues of these IT companies could be impacted by up to 33%.

“A weakening macro environment may translate into lower IT spends and slower growth for Indian IT companies,” stated a report by Motilal Oswal.

Courtesy: https://www.businessinsider.in/

Why Wasm is the future of cloud computing

Wasm may just be the most important emerging technology that you’ve never heard of.  It’s important!

Shorthand for WebAssembly language, Wasm was developed for the web. However, Wasm technology has expanded beyond the web browser. Now organizations are starting to run Wasm on the server side. For example, my company, SingleStore, is using it in our database.

Some think Wasm will replace container technology and the ubiquitous JavaScript.

Whether or not you believe that, Wasm is clearly making an impact on cloud computing. 

Wasm is cross-platform: Making it safer and simpler to bring cloud components together

People use all different kinds of languages to write software. Getting those languages to interact with each other is difficult. Wasm provides a framework in which you can write in whatever language you want. Then it produces a common, simulated machine format.

That format allows components written in various languages—like Rust, C/C++, and Go—to talk to each other. Wasm also provides the ability for server-side systems like databases to embed components from different languages without requiring you to know or care how that module was produced.

Think of Wasm as a universal plugin format. Say you would like to augment your system’s capabilities with a component developed by a third party. Wasm lets you bring the new component into your system without the risks that typically come with integrating add-ons. For example, an external component might crash the system or work in an unexpected way. Wasm mitigates these problems by creating an extremely safe framework for disparate systems and components to interact together.

The cloud is a big driver of Wasm’s expansion. Wasm is a good match for cloud because it’s virtualized and can work in any environment that supports the Wasm runtime. Also, cloud systems are typically composed of many services pieced together and connected in different ways. That can get complicated. But the more you can simplify your cloud environment, the easier it is for various aspects of cloud systems to work together correctly.

Wasm is secure: Lowering risk with its approach to running code and representing functions

In most language runtimes, functions have addresses. Those addresses are executable points in memory. If you are just looking at memory as a bunch of bytes, a function may be indistinguishable from the rest of the memory. This opens the door for people to find the function and inject code into it, or call a function in a privileged way so the function does something that it’s not supposed to do. Wasm’s design eliminates those problems.

Wasm represents functions in a way that is not exploitable. It also runs the code in a sandbox, which mitigates common security problems associated with running untrusted code. Because Wasm encapsulates the program memory in a safe area, nothing can get outside of it and access other places that might affect the host that’s running the program or compromise security.

And with Wasm’s capability-based security model, hosts have complete control over what kinds of privileged operations the Wasm program can run. For example, hosts must explicitly grant access to directories if file access is a requirement.

Wasm is fast: Eliminating what is not needed and enabling greater speed and efficiency

Clearly, Wasm isn’t the first technology people have used to bring things together in a safer, more simplified way. However, Wasm is much faster than some of those other technologies.

Compilers can generate Wasm programs by leveraging the LLVM back end, compiling down to the LLVM intermediate representation. LLVM, or low level virtual machine, is an extracted machine that many languages already compile down to. As a result of this approach, and thanks to many years of community effort around the LLVM project, Wasm programs can be compiled to highly optimized machine code.

At SingleStore, we created the Wasm Space Program—a virtual real-time universe inside a database—to demonstrate how fast and lightweight Wasm is. In this simulation, spaceships use different strategies to replenish energy and fight other spacecraft in a vast, real-time “universe.” That involves a vast amount of data, with more than one million ships in the system and nearly three million database updates per second.

Traditionally, integrating that data and assembling it on a mid-tier layer would require you to pull up a lot of data to the mid-tier. That could introduce a huge amount of lag, and require some complex caching to achieve a real-time response. Rather than taking that approach, each spaceship’s strategy has been written in Wasm, and loaded into the database as a UDF. Each second, each of the spaceships’ strategy functions are invoked to decide on its next move.

There’s nothing on the front end—a JavaScript program running in the browser—that understands these strategies, or anything about the state of the universe. Its job is simply to issue SQL queries directly to the database and graphically present the information that is returned. The database maintains all of the state  information, and because Wasm has allowed the compute to be right next to the data, it’s a lot faster. No mid-tier was even necessary.

But Wasm isn’t all fun and games. You can use it to address countless other applications and use cases. For example, you could use Wasm for sentiment analysis. The kind of complex logic required for sentiment analysis isn’t something that can easily be expressed in a database SQL dialect. So, in order to do this, you usually need to implement it in a more sophisticated language and then bring the data to it by downloading each row of data. Then you need to push the sentiment analysis rating back into the database. That means a round trip for every row in the database you use. If you have millions of rows, that creates a lot of network traffic. But with the way SingleStore has integrated Wasm, you are already in the database, so you don’t incur that overhead.

Wasm is getting better all the time: Creating standards makes it even more powerful

Wasm is already very capable. And with the new technologies and standards that are on the way, Wasm will let you do even more.

For example, the W3C WebAssembly Community Group, with help from members of organizations such as the Bytecode Alliance (of which SingleStore is a member), is currently working on standardizing the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI). WASI will provide a standard set of APIs and services that can be used when Wasm modules are running on the server. Many standard proposals are still in progress, such as garbage collection, network I/O, and threading, so you can’t always map the things that you’re doing in other programming languages to Wasm. But eventually, WASI aims to provide a full standard that will help to achieve that. In many ways, the goals of WASI are similar to POSIX.

Wasm as it now stands also doesn’t address the ability to link or communicate with other Wasm modules. But the Wasm community, with support from members of the computing industry, is working on the creation of something called the component model. This aims to create a dynamic linking infrastructure around Wasm modules, defining how components start up and communicate with each other (similar to a traditional OS’s process model).

Additionally, an emerging standard IDL syntax, called WIT (for WebAssembly Interface Types), will allow people to describe their Wasm interfaces in a language-agnostic way. As a result, binding generators will be able to take what’s in the IDL and compile code that will allow both the Wasm host and the guest to communicate data back and forth in a common way.

Wasm is the future: Providing a faster, more secure, and more efficient way to bring things together

Wasm, though more lightweight, may not replace containers any time soon. But you can expect Wasm to become part of a whole lot of software going forward.

Whether on the server or on the edge, Wasm lets you create custom logic that runs much closer to the data than it could before—and you can do it securely, efficiently, and with greater flexibility.

And now with SingleStore, you can compile your existing programs to Wasm, push them into the database, and run them there. That means that you may not  have to rewrite that code and put it somewhere the data is not. With Wasm technology, you can have the best of both worlds. 

https://www.infoworld.com/