Why You Cannot Afford To Fail With Intelligent Automation – Forbes

By Neil Edwards

Intelligent Automation and the CFO

Over the next two years, the CFO will play a pivotal role in championing intelligent automation for most companies. Why? Intelligent automation reduces costs (people mainly) and improves productivity, compliance, and accuracy for many of the processes falling under the CFO function.

Companies are excited about the reported benefits and investing heavily in intelligent automation. Forresterconfirms the excitement with the annual budgets for robotic process automation expanding to $2.9 billion in 2021. So, this intelligent automation wave will impact the people, processes, and systems reporting to every CFO in America. What are companies doing to be ready?

I caught up with two experts in the field: Abhishek Breja, Vice President and Head of Intelligent Automation and Transformation at Fiserv, and Gina Schaefer, Managing Director and Intelligent Automation Lead at Deloitte Consulting, LLP.

Solving The Not-So-Sexy Problems

The not-so-sexy problems facing CFOs today focus on labor costs, productivity, compliance, accuracy, and system efficiency. Improving one or more of these areas add up to significant gains for a company. Intelligent automation addresses a growing need that companies operationally ignored over the years. It also addresses the workflow and systems integration gaps left out by software providers.

Managing Director and Intelligent Automation Lead at Deloitte Consulting, LLP

The accounts payable or claims processing processes come to mind, said Gina Schaefer, These processes involve people doing repetitive, rules-based tasks involving paper and data entry into multiple systems.

She added that intelligent automation re-invents the accounts payable process. Robotic process automation (RPA) allows for data extraction and data entry to be taken over by the computer. AI makes some tasks more intelligent such as decision routing, computer vision, or natural language processing. We see the robots coming out of the human, and making workers more capable, said Schaefer. With over twenty years experience, Schafer knows what she is talking about, when comes to guiding companies on process transformation and intelligent automation.

The Results Are Real

Fiservs board appointed Abhishek Brejas team to improve performance across several areas with intelligent automation and artificial intelligence. His team has already delivered successful projects such as client onboarding, dispute management, customer service, and product implementations, Breja said. His team approaches every project with a profit and loss mindset, he added. His team delivered millions of dollars in savings to operating income for each individual project. The results are real and predictable because tight financial controllership is at the core of every project deliverable.

Abhishek Breja, Vice President and head of Intelligent Automation and Transformation at Fiserv

We are able to deliver quantifiable and auditable value through our portfolio of projects. In our experience, the value is delivered where a candidate process is vetted upfront for its transformation potential in terms of cost, revenue, risk, and customer experience. The vetting frame work for value is governed independently by the FP&A team under finance. Unlike many in the industry, we feel that a proof of concept must create real value, or it is a waste of time, said Abhishek Breja.

Where Is Intelligent Automation Today

Most large companies are cutting their teeth with small intelligent automation projects involving a limited scope and less than ten people. Except for in a few sectors like finance and technology, many companies have not expanded intelligent automation at scale across their end-to-end business processes.

Larger companies, over 50 percent by our recent survey, have successfully automated an accounting or customer onboarding process with robotic process automation, said Schaefer. RPA is the gateway drug that opens the eyes of the C-suite to what could be possible at scale with intelligent automation. She said, you would be surprised by how many Fortune 50 companies have not even started their automation journey, so it is all across the board.

Stay Flexible on Technology Choices

Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) are the two large technology silos that enable the intelligent automation of a companys business processes. While companies like UIPath, BluePrism, and IBM claim to offer end to end solutions covering both, our experts suggest a different experience.

Fiserv adopted a holistic technology approach using not just RPA, but multiple intelligent automation technologies as well as leading machine learning platforms. According to Breja, their methodology recommends imagining business process from the ground up with design thinking. Once designed for automation and scale, their business process is digitally packed with intelligent automation powered by artificial intelligence.

He says, Perception is not reality; executives in the industry, particularly digital immigrants, perceive RPA to be much easier than it really is, while AI/ML to be much harder than it really is. Brejas words of wisdom echo his years of experience having lead process transformation and intelligent automation projects inside companies such as Cisco, Assurant, and BCG.

Schaefer expressed a similar opinion that the intelligent automation solutions used by companies tend to be more hybrid at this point. While Deloitte has its own set of intelligent automation tools, she says that they fit a solution to match each individual customers requirements. She has not seen a single vendor provide everything that a company needs for its intelligent automation journey.

Building Your Intelligent Automation Team

Building your intelligent automation team by Neil Edwards

Both experts suggested some best practices to consider when building your team:

Develop Your Own Expertise

Finding experienced talent is one of the biggest impediments to getting started with intelligent automation.

Breja acquired his technical knowledge of machine learning and digital through extensive online education. Similarly, Schaefer ran one of the first automation projects designing an RPA system, before the term RPA existed.

Developing your own experience and knowledge base are is essential qualities. They learned the intelligent automation from the ground up, and actively stay on top of the technology capabilities. Schaefer and Breja also each had years of experience in business process transformation across many industries. They are the authentic expert in the room when called upon.

Winning the Intelligent Automation Race

The true test will be when large corporations deploy RPA and AI in scalable, repeatable ways, said Schaefer. She added that tasks like taking unstructured data into structured data or decisions in intelligent routing had been oversimplified in the marketing hype. Taking the robot out of the human sounds good on paper, and we are making progress, but we are not yet there.

Breja offered similar opinion, The fact that people brag about the number of bots and soft value says it all. They should really be talking about the quantifiable value delivered by an intelligent automation project. He is bullish on the future of intelligent automation, but recommends keeping a business mindset with design thinking for any candidate project.

So, the intelligent automation race is well underway in many companies today. The winnings in terms of cost savings, efficiency, and productivity are big. The investments in capital, talent, and time are not trivial. If you believe our experts, then you too can be successful. Intelligent automation is one race your company will definitely not want to miss.

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Why You Cannot Afford To Fail With Intelligent Automation - Forbes