The Robot and I: How New Digital Technologies Are Making Smart People and Businesses Smarter

Robby the Robot. Optimus Prime. C-3PO. Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 (a.k.a. “The Terminator”).

Cute, helpful or just plain terrifying, these are what come to mind when the word “automation” is invoked: classic interpretations of humanoid robots that replace people to do “things” better (or sometimes worse) than we can.

Of course, the most common real-world robots are the ones that make cars, unload ships, assemble any number of products or even vacuum floors.

But our latest research reveals that an entirely different scenario is emerging, in which humans are working smarter with sophisticated software to automate business tasks, which, in turn, is generating rich process data that drives meaningful insights, value and outcomes for businesses.

To understand what the future holds for intelligent automation, we surveyed 537 North American and European organizations, ranging from banks and insurers (property/casualty/life), to healthcare payers (see
methodology, page 22).

Our findings reveal significant new trends.

The first centers around the ability of intelligent automation to improve materially upon what people can do, as well as unlock meaning from data using process analytics. In some cases, organizations are automating work completely through digitization by re-imagining and instrumenting a process from its inception to harness the power of emerging digital technologies, such as social, mobile, analytics and cloud (or the SMAC Stack).