What is hyperautomation?
This article was written by Ma-Keba Frye, SEO Content Writer at MuleSoft.
Recent developments in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have put entire industries and businesses on the cusp of a new automation age known as hyperautomation. With 95% of current IT and engineering leaders prioritizing workflow automation, this new opportunity has spearheaded the lead for digital transformation across many businesses.
Combining advanced technology and tools, the new automation age credits its growth to robotic process automation (RPA). In this process, “bots'' are utilized to expedite manual tasks to increase operational efficiency, accuracy, and error reduction. Although the RPA market is forecasted to increase at double-digit rates through 2030, the hyperautomation market is expected to surpass these metrics, reaching nearly $600 billion by 2022.
This article explores the changing landscape of business automation, especially the benefits and importance of hyperautomation.
What is hyperautomation?
Although RPA has been instrumental in improving business processes, it’s just one piece of the automation puzzle. RPA is limited to automating repetitive, predefined, less complex tasks — that’s where hyperautomation comes in. Gartner defines hyperautomation as “a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible,” which can take RPA to greater heights while minimizing human resources input.
Why is hyperautomation important?
Hyperautomation refers to a superpower automation process combining several key elements: the power of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and optical character recognition (OCR). At its core, hyperautomation begins with RPA and adds a range of advanced technologies to achieve end-to-end automation through advanced tools and analytics like AI, machine learning, and business process management systems (BPMS).
In other words, hyperautomation scales on automation and amplifies its capabilities, building a process that is constantly advancing and improving through data. By adding intelligence to automation, this combination offers the horsepower and flexibility to automate the toughest processes – including undocumented operations that depend on unstructured information.
Independent of an organization’s infrastructure and repetitive labor, automation robots backed by AI and ML can still maneuver unstructured data inputs and make nuanced decisions. This enables enterprises to address customer expectations quickly, fulfill business goals, improve productivity, and boost efficiency.
For example, pure RPA bots are limited to reading standardized and digitized invoices and documents. On the other hand, when OCR and NLP are added to RPA, hyperautomated robots can perform tedious yet intuitive tasks such as sales reports, contracts, and reading invoices, emails, or official documents in various formats from different vendors. They can also listen, read, and engage in conversations to help respond and identify opportunities at record speed.
What are the benefits of hyperautomation?
It’s also important to understand that hyperautomation is not only limited to machine learning or artificial intelligence. With hyperautomation, you can use automation tools across systems, capturing automation as an entire process versus individual parts. Likewise, the benefits are limitless, including:
- Reducing operational obstacles: Hyperautomation can steer legacy systems and navigate through other functional barriers, pinpointing inefficiencies or obstacles in enterprise operations. Merging AI and RPA helps determine best optimization practices for automated processes, therefore providing the greatest impact points.
- Transforming live agents to digital workers: Strengthen your workforce by deploying digital workers to collaborate with employees for increased productivity or extra assistance. These digital workers, built through hyperautomation tools, can also help consumers navigate knowledge bases, provide support services, and manage accounts.
- Accelerating compound tasks: Hyperautomation pioneers a speedy pathway for digital transformation and increases automated tasks that were previously dependent on human insight and input. By streamlining several internal systems, hyperautomation provides visibility into previously hidden interactions between functions, KPIs, and processes.
- Increasing business agility: Organizations today must be able to adapt their processes to new market needs. Hyperautomation enables them to scale operations, respond to market changes, and pursue emerging opportunities.
What are some hyperautomation use cases?
Hyperautomation's enhanced robotic intelligence capabilities enable organizations to amplify the automation of key business processes. A few use cases include:
- Healthcare: Machine learning, AI, NLP, and RPA provide immense value in improving processes in the healthcare industry. Using these tools together, hyperautomation enables organizations to save time, standardize processes, and reduce errors by automating repetitive tasks related to patient testing, medication reconciliation, patient registration, insurance verification, and more.
- Financial services: The rise of alternative lending methods, fintechs, and challenger banks has made the financial services industry even more competitive. With hyperautomation, financial institutions can transform their operations and remain competitive by improving customer onboarding, streamlining compliance processes, and improving accuracy and speed.
- Customer service: As customer expectations and demands change, a business must find ways to adapt its operations to address customer concerns and enhance the customer experience. Integrating hyperautomation into customer service processes and systems can reduce manual tasks, sort queries, provide fast solutions, and streamline workflows.
In essence, hyperautomation mobilizes the power of organizations to connect employees, systems, and automation robots to collaborate for future business outcomes and goals. Read our whitepaper to learn more about aligning your business automation strategy to build a composable enterprise.