4 Insights from Innovation Day

Yesterday, we completed our first Innovation Day—an event for digital champions looking for innovative and efficient automation tactics to power and accelerate their digital transformation. During this event, we revealed what’s possible when automation comes to life by showcasing real customer examples, highlighted new automation strategies that will positively impact businesses and their employees, and showcased the latest product innovations through deep dives and demos. For those of you who attended our Innovation Day yesterday, thank you. And for those who missed the event, we’ve put together four key takeaways to help you advance your automation journey.

#1 Break down functional process silos

The back office is the backbone of today’s modern digital enterprise. Back-office departments such as finance and accounting, HR, shared services, and operations provide vital services critical to an organization’s success. The trouble is, as with the front office, the back office is often hampered by departmental silos brought on by legacy systems that were never designed to interact. And those silos can slow down business processes, affect collaboration between departments and offices, and lead to missteps and errors.

When intelligent automation is deployed holistically, it can breakdown the silos to help deliver the speed, efficiency, and resiliency that any business can benefit from. Automation can streamline back-office processes end to end and seamlessly connect systems, applications, departments, and offices, enhancing collaboration and communication.

#2 Every employee deserves a digital assistant

Today, many of us have digital assistants in our home, such as Amazon Alexa. So why not have one for work? During Innovation Day, attendees were introduced to AARI, Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface, the game-changing digital assistant that makes automation accessible to everyone.

With AARI, you can control and use Automation Anywhere bots in your enterprise through the interface of your choice. Install AARI on your desktop to retrieve and update data. Your digital assistant can gather information from disparate sources, update all systems at once, trigger bots for end-to-end process automation, and safeguard access to PII data and sensitive systems.

You can quickly and easily trigger bots with a single click or as a result of an event from enterprise applications you use every day such as Salesforce, Excel, Google Sheets, and more—allowing those applications to serve as the launching point for all process automations.

AARI is simple to use out of the box and native to the interface you use, so there are no new, complicated commands to learn.

#3 Everyone can build automations

Within your enterprise, there is an untapped resource for scaling your automation. That resource? Your business users. Under the right circumstances, everyone can build software bots. Innovation Day presented a path for your employees to transform into citizen developers, facilitating and accelerating the digital journey.

The path starts with creating a program to encourage and guide users into their expanded role, providing standards, goals, and incentives and defining key performance indicators. It requires aligning business units and securing support from the leaders within the business—must-haves for success. The transformation also requires training and having the right automation development tools designed specifically for the potential citizen developer who has no technical expertise or prior automation knowledge. With a low-code/no-code, cloud-based way to build automation, who wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity?

IT leaders shouldn’t worry about losing control of governance. With the right platform in place, you can empower users while maintaining complete oversight.

#4 Smart automation only, please

Automation has become a key value driver in the back and front office. Adding native artificial intelligence (AI) to software bots can increase the scope and breadth of what you can automate. Infusing AI into every stage of a process can unlock value in every step.

AI can help with reading and processing structured and unstructured data—similar to how humans perform the tasks. AI can analyze the data and provide insights to create reports. AI-infused bots can understand the sentiment or meaning of an email. They can be used to detect failures in a system and optimize performance. They can determine risk. And they can mimic human-like decision-making. It’s this simplicity that makes AI practical in automation…finally.

During Innovation Day, attendees saw demonstrations of our Automation Anywhere intelligent automation solutions at work. Check out the AI session and see how to:

• Easily add and build AI to your workflows
• Use Enterprise A2019 platform’s plug and play framework to augment skills such as conversational UIs, data science models, and predictive models
• Build intelligent bots with a simple drag-and-drop action

Access the sessions

Ready to get more insights into the highlights above and drill deeper into what Automation Anywhere solutions can do for you? Access all of the Innovation Day content on demand.