For the last couple years, Gartner and other industry analysts have focused on hyperautomation as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends.

As more and more organizations have looked toward digital transformation to help improve the way they work, the benefits of hyperautomation have become more valuable to business operations and overall strategy. But what exactly is hyperautomation and how can it create value within the business landscape? 

First, we need to have a clear understanding of what hyperautomation is and how it can help organizations. Hyperautomation is the automated handling of as many processes as possible to free worker time from routine processes and repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more complex problems.

This focus on hyperautomation — or AI-powered Automation — began before the pandemic, which has now greatly accelerated the impact of work-from-home, decentralized teams and new processes needed to continue business.

Key to hyperautomation success: Determining the right approach

Currently, there are two major approaches to automation technologies — modern AI-powered Automation versus existing “build-your-own” approaches.

Consider what’s different about these two approaches and how they can deliver a more end-to-end automation experience.

The challenge with today’s hyperautomation landscape is that it’s very fragmented, with approaches and automation technologies far from standardized. Businesses have largely integrated different automation software tools to essentially build their own AI-powered Automation platform. 

While consultancies focus on automation transformation services to provide tooling that can unify some of what’s needed to drive hyperautomation, these “build-your-own” approaches can’t drive full insights that create business value, leaving the full range of automation benefits unrealized.  

But by implementing a modern AI-powered Automation approach that includes advanced technologies, organizations can streamline business by reducing the need for human intervention in manual tasks and expand what’s possible. With a modern approach, businesses can do the following:

• Apply automation tools to enable digital process automation for both business and IT users
• Unify automation across all process areas
• Handle dynamic and routine business process flow together
• Separate detections, actions and optimizations, applying process mining to identify automation opportunities
• Leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as a means to identify automation opportunities and determine their potential business impact
• Extend the capabilities of robotic process automation (RPA) by automating different types of workflows and processes, including server scripting, container management, optical character recognition (OCR), intelligent business process management (iBPMS) and software release

As an example, consider this use case of a company’s mobile app. To deliver the best customer experience, the company needed to automate their process for addressing customer issues. They required an app that needed to automatically detect issues, offer the customer something for their inconvenience while simultaneously opening internal tickets to fix the issue, proactively determine what the issue could be, annotate the ticket, notify the internal owner of the issue and stand up a container test environment automatically to troubleshoot. This mix of RPA bot, AIOps, helpdesk, document processing, automation software and intelligent process automation is not only complex but requires a holistic integrated approach to drive real automation optimization.

How IBM AI-powered Automation and the IBM Cloud Paks for Automation deliver value

Companies are quickly advancing beyond basic analytics and AI insights, moving to a greater range of tools that allow them to achieve the full benefits of hyperautomation. A critical benefit of adopting AI-powered Automation into an enterprise is being able to identify gaps and opportunities and focus efforts on those value-add areas.

IBM has many years of experience in the automation space and technologies that culminate in today’s IBM Cloud Paks for Automation. With a complete and modular set of AI-powered Automation capabilities to tackle common and complex operational challenges, the IBM Cloud Paks for Automation provide a common approach to detecting, acting and optimizing all your processes in the only unified AI-powered Automation business and IT platform on the market. IBM Cloud Paks for Automation add domain-specific capabilities in AIOps, Business Automation, Integration and Network Automation with AI-powered Automation. Partners also can use the IBM Automation foundation to power their own solutions.

See how IBM AI-powered Automation and IBM Cloud Paks for Automation can work for you:

Powering decision intelligence in the enterprise

Whitespace, an IBM partner, has released “eamli,” a product that powers data-driven decision making in the enterprise — both at the center and edge. The eamli product utilizes capabilities within the IBM Cloud Paks for Automation to quickly connect to required datasets, analyze objectives from potential decisions and provide an optimized set of decision simulations for consideration.

A Ministry of the UK government is currently utilizing eamli to provide decision intelligence to better manage and optimize their portfolio of project and program delivery against an annual budget of over $6 Billion. As they continue to scale automation, more benefits are being realized:

• Collates data from around the enterprise into one holistic view using data connectors to quickly integrate existing databases and data management tools
• Draws only on the structured and unstructured data needed to inform the desired decision
• Informs complex decision-making quickly and efficiently
• Provides a single view to understand the interaction between data, decisions, objectives and efficiency
• Explainable AI and ML drives advanced analytics insights using natural language processing with understandable human language
• Supports decision-making for both the strategic direction at the center of the enterprise and the delivery of day-to-day decision-making at the edge of the enterprise

The Whitespace team continues to work with the IBM AI-powered Automation technologies to create event-driven automation and plan to create a hyperautomated decision intelligence capability for the enterprise in both the public and private sector by 2022.                            

With eamli and other partner products powered by IBM AI-powered Automation technologies, a modern, more streamlined hyperautomation approach can now be a reality, providing fast time to value with less investment.      

Learn more

• Learn more about IBM AI-powered Automation technologies.
• See how AI-powered Automation is leading to big payoffs
• Reclaim up to 50% of your time with self-service automation — register for the watsonx Orchestrate Early Access Program
• Learn more about Whitespace and eamli
• If you are an IBM partner and interested in incorporating AI-powered automation by building on the IBM Automation Foundation, sign up to learn more about our early access program