We are at a critical juncture in technology and the future of work. One of the most promising developments of this digital age is that any person and organization can have an automation mindset and create an astonishing level of continuous innovation and automation within organizations. With the right mindset, we don't need the same level of resources as previous generations. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence—AI and automation technologies, anyone and business can now achieve the speed and scale to transform and thrive.
We are at a critical juncture in technology and the future of work. One of the most promising developments of this digital age is that any person and organization can have an automation mindset and create an astonishing level of continuous innovation and automation within organizations. With the right mindset, we don't need the same level of resources as previous generations. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence—AI and automation technologies, anyone and business can now achieve the speed and scale to transform and thrive.
But productivity gains don't just happen because the technology exists. People have to figure out the best way to reorganize their work around that. There is a need for a plan to embrace a new way of working that focuses on the big picture, thrives on change, and involves everyone.
The New Era of Automation The word automation can reach a wide universe. For some, it's a way to replace manual labor with robots. For others, it raises concern. It's important to have an automation mindset and think about automation in a new way so we don't lose its benefits. In the future, people and companies with the right mindset about automation will thrive in the face of challenges, rather than succumb to them. This mindset will determine whether they take advantage of opportunities or are interrupted by them.
People and companies with the right mentality apply advances in automation and Artificial Intelligence - AI to become leaders and adapt to the new opportunities of the markets that operate or that create new markets. Automation and AI are central to this new way of thinking called the new automation mindset.
The Process Mentality in the automation mentality We buy apps to solve problems and add features. They complete tasks or facilitate task groups. But the tasks are not isolated, together they form processes, which make up the business. To understand how the tasks fit into the big picture, we need to apply systemic thinking.
Companies need a cohesive and unified base of data, workflows, and user experiences to be able to begin to drive successful transformation in their business. The true value of automation is connecting all of our applications and processes with the business. To solve the growing problem of fragmentation in our processes, we need something that allows a holistic and multifunctional view of the different processes that support our organization.
The Growth Mentality in the Automation Mindset Companies that choose to embrace change have a growth mindset. The growth mindset isn't just about our ability to react to major events, such as the pandemic, the market crash. It's also about our response to the everyday challenges that persist in our companies. Our businesses need to be equally effective in responding to the daily challenges and crises that threaten companies, where a topic may represent a threat or an opportunity, as it depends on the ability to make decisions.
We are operating in an environment of rapid and continuous change. Technology, competitive dynamics and, above all, people's behaviors and expectations are continuously changing around us. Whether these changes are a threat or an opportunity largely comes down to adaptability. We want the new processes to be predictable, but the key is for them to be adopted for new circumstances.
The Scale Mentality in the Automation Mindset In the past, companies tried to scale up by adding more. But continuously increasing the number of employees is not a realistic or economic choice. The large number of processes means that there will never be enough IT specialists to keep up with demand.
Business teams are creative, attentive, and eager to solve problems. They are well versed in the data, applications, and business logic that underlie the core processes in their domain and collectively know the organization's vision and mission. When business teams aren't empowered to solve their problems, it's a missed opportunity for automation.
The scale mentality means embracing a new operating model that exploits the company's latent potential. A scale mindset doesn't disempower the IT team. Raise your profile within the organization. Business teams need to be empowered by training, consulting, mentoring, support services, and the right combination of technologies. The IT team is ideal for this.
Rethinking technical knowledge is not designed to replace them, but to elevate them as a steward of the company's potential. Adopting the scale mentality will do more than expand a company's technical capability—it can focus on it.
Ability to manage the new automation mentality The coordination of people, software, and data in end-to-end processes to get work done. With proper management, people—clients, employees, or partners—are still key components of the process where their strengths are most needed.
Management allows our people and technology to maximize their respective strengths. Technology, especially AI, is able to interpret large data sets throughout the process and even build a model for optimal end-to-end management, but people are better at creative tasks or handling non-standard exceptions. Management keeps technology, human experience, and automation in balance, maximizing results for the company. It asks how to do the best job with each available resource.
People, processes, and systems are the most basic building blocks of management. End-to-end processes always involve all three. These ingredients are intertwined and linked together. When managing, companies establish sustainable advantages with frictionless and efficient processes.
Capacity for continuous adaptation Everyone yearns for people and companies to do better than survive difficult times; wanting them to always prosper, whether in times of crisis or even in the constant evolution of transforming everything into an opportunity for sustainable growth. Thus, we need to build systems that thrive under stress from crises or even growth.
People and companies must grow and reconnect in response to challenges and opportunities. Unfortunately, that's not typical. The processes are strict and, in this climate, a strict company is dying.
Flexible processes allow companies to:
Thrive despite external pressure from the economy or competition Refocus quickly in times of internal organizational turmoil Continuously improve to identify new and unique ways to achieve objectives Enter new markets, maximize efficiency, create amazing customer experiences, develop innovative products and services The three main components that organizations must include in their automation strategy are:
Structuring capabilities: allowing teams to transform automations into the organization's building blocks; AI-assisted management: the ability to quickly assemble building blocks to achieve end-to-end results manually or through assisted AI; Flexible experiences: allowing people to interact and participate in workflows without requiring long development cycles. It is recommended that companies integrate these components first to eliminate stiffness.
Democratization of automation Those responsible for maintaining the company's technology protect the company from risks. Line-of-business workers are trying to make their jobs faster, easier, or achieve higher-quality results. These two objectives are not always aligned. Leaders must embrace them as complementary forces and build an operating model that supports both sides.
Democratizing automation allows people to automate workflows using their ideas of what's best for the company. Sometimes those ideas come from the business and other times from IT.
A collaborative approach creates trust between the two teams and a healthy respect for the challenges that each team faces on a daily basis. This is fundamental, because without trust, many projects are mired in notes and disagreements.
In this vision of democratization, IT needs to assume a more strategic leadership role. IT must allow people across the company to automate. Training, consulting, mentoring, and support are needed. This includes providing the technology and means to do the job, but it also means establishing, communicating, and enforcing rules that protect the company.
Mastering Your Automation Journey What we've learned so far gives us a point of view that rises above our immediate goals and projects to see the results that need to be delivered across the company. With this vision, we can align our automation work with the business outcomes that make a company thrive.
Our new automation mindset makes us recognize the key results that automation can:
Drive revenue growth Increase customer retention and expansion Help retain employees and empower them to be productive Improve relationships and efficiency with suppliers Encourage operational excellence These results are fundamental to any business. They should also be fundamental to any automation strategy.
The processes generally have a primary focus on one of these higher-level objectives. When setting out to execute an automation strategy, leaders must organize their approach around these five pillars, which drive the associated central objectives.
The Back Office IT and finance back office functions are crucial for a company with the new automation mindset. Many companies have worked hard to make back office functions more efficient, but there's still a lot of room for improvement with automation, including faster end-to-end processing, greater agility, and improved experiences.
While some people downplay the importance of back-office functions because they are not direct revenue-generating services, they are, in fact, the foundation of every company.
Automating these fundamental processes can have a direct impact on every aspect of the customer experience, employee experience, and front-office operations and helps ensure that the rest of the business doesn't stop.
All of this results in real competitive differentiation for the business. It's for this reason that many companies start with back office functions when embarking on their automation journey.
The Front Office The front-office pillar of automation includes parts of the company that are customer-oriented or revenue-generating, with sales and marketing being the largest functions. All of these areas are automation opportunities.
The automation goals for the front-office are, in short, the same as the business goals. Fundamentally, we want to increase revenue.
This is achieved by helping sales teams sell more products or services, marketing to increase awareness, and customer support or delivery teams to retain and sell more customers.
But the results don't stop there. A well-automated front office results in improved customer experiences, elevated employee experience, and improves the lower and upper lines, creating incredible moments for customers.
The Employee Experience The employee experience pillar includes everything that involves how an employee engages with their employer. There is enormous potential to delight our people and generate more productivity with automation.
It is necessary to build continuous processes to support the employee's entire journey and create the moments that pass the most. Not only will we have happy employees, but we'll find efficiencies along the way.
Automation to improve the employee experience has three components: culture, technology, and processes. If we want to create pleasant experiences for employees, the three need to come together.
The Customer Experience The customer experience leaves a lasting impression and is the difference between people becoming promoters or detractors of our brands. So creating and obsessing over a great customer experience is a smart approach.
As many customer interactions take place in the digital space, customer expectations have changed to match. That means customers want their experiences to be faster, self-service, app-driven, and more. On the other hand, they don't want the impersonal or restrictive experiences that are overly automated and impersonal.
The customer experience automation pillar is comprised of the key points of contact between organizations and their customers. This includes customer service, customer data management, marketing, and commerce functions.
Operations with Suppliers Almost every company has to work with suppliers. Companies may be acquiring raw materials for manufacturing, leveraging outside service providers, or relying on partners to support other parts of their business. The interactions between a company and its suppliers and partners are ripe opportunities for automation.
Every supply chain has two flows—the flow of goods and materials in one direction and data, and information flows back in the other direction. As the goods are shipped from the sender to the recipient, information from each step along the journey is relayed to the sender.
Typical processes that are part of the supplier's tower of operations include request to discount, purchase to pay, source to hire, plan for product, and more. All of these challenges and all of these processes have opportunities to apply automation to significantly streamline operations.
and organizations. More than text, code, or images, what Artificial Intelligence can give you is the ability to add substance to ideas. Looking at this from a corporate lens, AI can completely rethink existing processes. But how? Artificial Intelligence is versatile and expressive, but the output is raw and varies according to the input.
To take advantage of Artificial Intelligence at scale, companies need an enterprise AI platform with a set of technical specifications and core features:
The ability to generate solutions that can be accurately interpreted by any human being. Users should only be able to connect or run these solutions. The necessary means for non-technical people to monitor and solve any problems that may arise. The ability to train and improve your model based on problems discovered as part of executing AI-generated solutions. The automation ecosystem The number of potential automation solutions is large. Most companies use a lot of specialized tools, but they still strive to obtain the value that was promised to them. The approach is broken and unsustainable, and the cost and effort of most automation tools is intense. To be successful in this new era, we must apply them in the right way.
We need a robust, cohesive, and strategic approach to fulfill the promise of automation. This strategic approach to automation requires the ability to democratize and allow larger teams to automate.
It needs to act like the glue to tie together our apps, people, and specialized automation tools.
The Enterprise AI and Business Automation Platform Artificial Intelligence has changed the way we see our tasks, jobs, in such a way that we maintain our plasticity.
That may seem like a tall order, but the reality is that all of this is totally possible today. This is something that companies are already advancing, called business automation.
Different technologies encompass different capabilities. But some of these technologies offer more technical value than commercial value. The new automation mindset requires a broader view of the problem: a vision that aligns with the business outcomes we want, rather than the technology. This comes down below to focus on what we're looking to simplify: the business process.
Every business process is made up of human interactions and system actions. Automated processes need to work within dynamic business environments. This means that human tasks and system actions need to interact with:
Communication channels and collaboration tools Applications (Apps) Data stored everywhere Partners and suppliers There are three pillars of integration features that we need to support to fully automate business processes.
Experience: Resources related to integration with employees, customers, and other stakeholders. Data: resources for integrating data across multiple systems for data consistency, system updates, and managing business events on the data. Process: resources that allow us to link these human and system actions in an end-to-end flow with exceptional paths and leveraging event-oriented actions. To support these integration requirements at scale, we need to allow for multiple architectural styles. A good architecture allows teams to create solutions that are easy to operate, test, and scale. It also allows them to share reusable assets to reduce the reinvention of the wheel.
The New Operating Model Applying automation to every corner of the company is big business and will almost certainly change the way employees do their jobs. A well-planned approach is critical.
Large-scale organizational change requires a combination of the right incentives with the right social pressure to move the company in the right direction. With automation, we want to put the right operating model into practice and feed it with a culture of automation. This type of change impacts many people across the company, and they need to be accompanied by the change.
The New Career Plans Fear of change is part of human nature. Today, many are concerned that robots, AI, and automation will make us all redundant. Some politicians and journalists are building careers based on that age-old fear. Fear expands beyond technology, but even within technology, with the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence, people are starting to wonder. When technology promises to change the way we work, we react naturally:
What's that going to do with the jobs? How will career plans change? What type of new shares will grow in value? What can people do to stay ahead? Change is constant, but some innovations have an enormous impact on society. History is on our side, as technology has created more and more opportunities.
While robots that mimic human labor and generative AI models have been making headlines, an exciting career revolution has been quietly taking place behind the scenes. Low-code and no-code automation platforms are fueling a new creative explosion in companies.
Business leaders are seeing opportunities being created and technology-focused functions are appearing in thousands of companies.
New opportunities, ideas, challenges, and efficiencies are just waiting to be discovered. All you need is someone who is motivated and able to take a step forward and build something that will change the trajectory of your company - and your career - forever.
The decisions of even a business leader can have real implications for how the story unfolds. If we stick to the old automation mentality, we'll be setting our companies up for failure. Adopting the new automation mindset is the right path for every company.
Not only will it lead to dramatic business results, but it will also empower individuals to accelerate their own careers, leading to happier people and a healthier society. The technology is there. All we need to do is assume our roles as catalysts — and the rest will follow.
The key people you need to consider when implementing an automation strategy can be grouped into three categories:
Leadership: The widespread use of automation requires buy-in and support from the company's top levels. Automation builders: Those who build and maintain automations for the company will need to learn new skills and take on new challenges. Recipients of automation: When automating any business process, there is a wide range of employees and contractors whose jobs may change as a result of that automation. Each of these groups has very specific incentives, and unlocking them will help show each group how they'll be better off. Develop key messages that resonate with those teams, and as those key messages take root, you'll start to see movement in the company.
The Future of the Company The new automation mindset is a new way of thinking about technology and a different way of thinking about business. But, in the end, it is a path to build unstoppable, adaptable, and resilient companies despite challenges.
The changing software landscape, with the technology revolution underway, means that the chance to build unstoppable companies is more accessible than ever.
The new automation mindset is no longer reserved just for companies that can afford armies of engineers.
It's tempting to think of the new automation mindset as an end goal. If we reach the magical mountain peak, we think our journey is complete.
It's a call to always be improving, and to always be looking for ways to be more agile, to work harder than ever to build a different type of company, a company to thrive in the coming decades.
Get in touch with TATICCA Allinial Global Brazil , which provides integrated auditing, internal auditing, accounting, tax, corporate finance, financial advisory, risk advisory, technology, business consulting and training services, for more information, at www.taticca.com.br or e-mail taticca@taticca.com.br and learn more. Our company has certified methodologies for carrying out activities.
