It’s budget season again. Time to place our bets for the coming year.
The past year was made more difficult due to the shifting economic climate, underperformance of many of the major stocks and the financial repercussions of the COVID pandemic that will likely be felt for many a future budget cycle.
For the year ahead, we have to place our bets wisely. We may not have the finer details on numbers just yet, but enterprises should have a feel for where they will place their chips. My predictions for the coming year are based on countless hours studying the automation market, attending nearly a dozen industry-related conferences and the deep understanding of the headwinds and tailwinds that comes only from working arm-in-arm with enterprise clients and technology partners.
Here is where the automation market is headed in 2023:
- The use of AI will explode in contact centers. From machine learning that powers conversational intelligence to correctly categorize customer intent, to conversational AI in an app that deals with customer queries without the need for a human agent, the use of AI will become prevalent across the contact center. This will not be specific to early adopters. The use of AI will enable new insights and efficiencies and will create new roles in the contact center, not just reduce headcount.
- Employee experience becomes a key KPI in automation business cases. The Great Resignation and challenges brought about by the work-from-home model are pushing employee experience (EX) improvement to the top of the priority list. Ensuring your valuable resources stay in their roles, grow in capability and are happy at work have become board-level agenda items. Automations that improve EX by assisting employees will be given priority over pure cost takeout, at least in the short term, as we look to wrap our arms around our employees throughout 2023.
- Generic point solutions start to become pointless. Automation tools that provide generic solutions will be shelved in favor of specific solutions that address particular problems or a particular industry. Automation players and system integrators will double down on solving big business challenges either in an industry or a department. Expect to see solutions grow in prominence that automate important pieces of work in claims in Insurance, R&D in Life Sciences, efficiency in contact centers, onboarding of new employees and other business challenges.
- Process orchestration moves from the fringe into the mainstream. Automation technologies have proliferated such that enterprises have multiple intelligent automation tools and systems in play. These tools are, of course, interacting with employees of all types. But to work together, digital workers, human workers and intelligent automation systems require orchestration and scheduling. Much as the data integration layer was created years ago with tools like Appian & Tibco, it is time now for business process orchestration, with tools like Enate.
- Major RPA players will become potential buyers for conversational AI platforms. Conversational interfaces will continue to grow in popularity, especially with the release of GPT3Chat, and RPA solution providers will see an increasing need to provide this mechanism directly in their offerings. Partnerships with the major cloud providers‘ natural language processing (NLP) engines and integrations with conversational AI platforms like Cognigy and Kore.ai will still be well used by companies, but at least one major RPA vendor will aquire a chatbot provider in the near future.
What predictions are you making for the next 12 months? If they involve upping your automation game, contact us to talk about how we can work together and bring these predictions to life for you.
About the author
Wayne Butterfield
Wayne is an automation pioneer, initially starting out as an early adopter of RPA in 2010, creating one of the first Enterprise scale RPA operations. His early setbacks at Telefonica UK, led to many of the best practices now instilled across RPA centres of excellence around the globe. Customer centric at heart, Wayne also specialises in Customer Service Transformation, and has been helping brands in becoming more Digitally focused for their customers. Wayne is an expert in Online Chat, Social Media and Online Communities, meaning he is perfectly placed to help take advantage of Chat Bots & Virtual Assistants. More recently Wayne has concentrate on Cognitive & AI automation, where he leads the European AI Automation practice, helping brands take advantage of this new wave of automation capability.
