AI and Automation: The key to navigating economic uncertainty?

Today’s geopolitical and economic environment is incredibly volatile. With 61% of chief economists predicting that the global economy will weaken further next year and 90% predicting geopolitics will be a source of global and economic volatility, organisations are increasingly seeking technological solutions, including automation and integration, to navigate the challenges posed by such a dynamic and unpredictable business environment.

Automation and integration tools have become highly sought after utilities for boosting efficiency and productivity, and the relevant strategies will continue to evolve as businesses look to use them to improve business agility amidst uncertainty and volatility. However, the 2024 automation and integration strategies will increasingly be impacted by AI technology, which will drastically change some of the well-established rules of the game. 

The widespread recognition of AI's advantages in various business domains stems from remarkable advancements in AI tool sophistication and in the enormous popularity of generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Consequently, IT teams must devise how to effectively democratises and govern the use of AI tools among their employees to ensure that the utilisation of AI is not only advantageous but doesn’t lead to security and compliance issues.

Businesses are also increasingly realising that AI alone is not enough. Only by leveraging AI in combination with automation and integration platform, organisations can not only survive but also flourish in the face of uncertainty.

The use of AI and digital democratisation go hand-in-hand

According to multiple industry watchers (see Infosys' The Future of Work 2023 Report) the top investment priorities for progressive business leaders include the adoption of automation tools. These are primarily focused on improving business processes efficiency and reducing their costs, both key objectives for every business. 

Similarly, businesses have been using integrations for decades to synchronise data across different systems.  Therefore, most businesses looking to take advantage of AI are already quite familiar with these tools.

Nonetheless, we believe that, at least 50% of generative AI initiatives in 2024 will fail to deliver the anticipated business benefits due to a lack of integration with business processes. 

In a nutshell, the potential business value of Generative AI can only be fully unleashed if generative AI is incorporated in end-to-end business processes. Otherwise, its contribution will remain limited to assisting individual and isolated tasks of possibly notable, but marginal business value.

Therefore, it is crucial that forward-thinking enterprises strive to unlock the untapped potential within their workforce by empowering both their business and IT teams by synergically leveraging AI, automation and integration technologies.

CIOs should make sure the combination of AI, automation and integration tools they provide to the organisation is inclusive and democratised, that is, available to the widest possible audience. Involving business teams favours the spread of the efficiency, agility and innovation benefits of these technologies throughout the organisation. This democratisation process should enable employees to leverage AI, automation and integration capabilities, but also avoid excessive complication of the technology stack. For example, enterprises should select automation and integration platforms that can both support IT experts and business experts and are natively predisposed to work with a variety of AI platforms. 

During this process, organisations should steer clear of a common error: forgetting or postponing investments in governance. Given the short learning curve of these tools, their adoption can spread rapidly, and enterprises may end up with dozens of builders and hundreds of applications in few months or even weeks. The need for governance suddenly manifest, but it might be too late: at that stage regaining control and enforcing governance is a daunting task.  

Similarly, enterprises should avoid introducing additional risks by paying close attention to security issues from day one of their adoption of AI in combination with automation and integration.

The role of integration and automation technology

Although many businesses still view AI in general, and generative AI specifically, as a cutting-edge and immature technology, many organisations' limitations, and risks, are shifting focus towards extensive operationalisation. They are finding that, to incorporate generative AI into their business processes, they must set up and optimise an underlying infrastructure designed for long-term strategic and effective use. 

Considering how the value of AI is greater if integrated into business processes, an integral part of this infrastructure is a comprehensive integration and automation infrastructure capable of orchestrating AI functions with traditional systems that could potentially participate in AI “infused” business processes. This is critical because organisations that successfully infuse AI capabilities into their business processes will outperform their competitors and establish sustainable competitive differentiation.

The infrastructure must include different types of capabilities including integration, to make it possible to connect to any end-point system, and automation, to orchestrate AI and traditional systems in the context of end-to-end business processes. To maximise democratised access to the infrastructure they must expose a low code development environment. Organisations should investigate to what extent AI can further help democratisation, and the infrastructure should include appropriate operation, management, security and governance capabilities to make it possible for IT teams to retain control even in a highly distributed, democratised environment. 

A strong system of governance is essential to prevent the risk of descending into anarchy rather than fostering a truly democratised approach.  Establishing guardrails is crucial to ensure security, scalability, manageability, change management, compliance, and other necessary requirements, forming the foundational support for democratisation. 

For automation processes to truly impact real-time outcomes arising from actual business events, the focus must be on automating real-time processes. When the automation capabilities are powered by AI and accessible to employees, collaborative knowledge sharing enables colleagues and teams to collectively determine the best approaches to building automation processes.

CIOs should be ambitious and target the big picture

When organisations approach new technology, they initially target small, business challenges. They want to validate the supposed benefits and discover the pitfalls of the new technology by applying it to a relatively small scale, not overly complicated and “isolated” problem. This way they avoid the risk of compromising significant business activities because of the defects or misuse of a technology they do not yet know enough about. 

This is a wise approach but should not remain the prevailing attitude once the initial technology on-boarding is completed. Instead, CIOs should help the organisation “think big” and figure out how the new technology benefits can be experienced above and beyond scenarios that mimic the initial, experimental use case. 

This may lead to a task-oriented approach, which is myopic and usually leads to suboptimal results. The key to success lies in adopting a new leadership mindset that takes a holistic view of end-to-end processes when incorporating AI, automation and integration, rather than succumbing to a narrow, task-oriented focus. 

When combined with an agile approach that aims at democratisation, the use of AI in the context of automated end-to-end processes will provide businesses with a foundation for competitive differentiation and growth. CIOs that embrace and prove able to materialise this vision will provide a key contribution to their organisations long term viability by enabling it to rapidly adapt to the twists and turns of the volatile business environment and promptly reap the associated benefits.