Pascal Bornet is a recognized global expert and pioneer in the field of intelligent automation and hyper-automation. A senior executive with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation, he founded and led the “AI & Automation” practices at McKinsey and at Ernst & Young (EY). A Member of the Forbes Technology Council and a Senior Advisor for the Institute for Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence (IRPA AI), he has been awarded LinkedIn’s “Global Top Voice in Tech” and has 300k+ followers on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media.
His new book “Intelligent Automation” was recently featured in Thinkers360’s “50 Books from Thinkers360 Thought Leaders You Should Read in 2021“. Pascal also recently ranked #1 in Thinkers360’s “Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on RPA (October 2020)“. We caught up with Pascal to learn more about his perspectives on intelligent automation (IA) as well as his new book.
“INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harvest AI to boost business and make our world more human”. It presents the outcome of 18 months of research, including surveys across over 200 Intelligent Automation experts, and leverages the lessons learned from over 500 intelligent automation transformations across decades of experience.
Individuals: To join our thought leadership community, participate in our leaderboards, and to showcase your own profile and portfolio, sign-up today for free!
Readers: To browse amazing content – including articles/blogs, books, podcasts and videos, from our opt-in B2B thought leader and influencer community with over 25,000 carefully-curated content items – join Thinkers360 today!
Brands: Sign-up to find and work with experts in your niche and to showcase your own executives, thought leaders and content among our opt-in community with over 25M followers on social media combined!
Thinkers360: What is Intelligent Automation (IA)? How do you define it?
PB: It is one of the most recent and impactful trends in the broad field of artificial intelligence.
In our new book “Intelligent Automation”, my co-authors Ian Barkin and Jochen Wirtz have defined Intelligent Automation (also called Hyperautomation or Cognitive Automation) as a combination of methods and technologies, involving people, organizations, machine learning, low-code platforms, robotic process automation (RPA), and more. It is aimed at automating end-to-end business processes in a computerized environment. It delivers business outcomes on behalf of the employees. It works hand-in-hand with them to deliver faster, better and cheaper services, improving significantly employee and customer experiences.
For example, IA supports the automation of most work activities in “Procure to Pay”: from the selection of vendors (using machine learning), sending of orders (leveraging workflow platforms), reception and processing of their invoices (with natural language processing), up to the payment of these vendors (with RPA).
Thinkers360: How is Intelligent Automation related to Industry 4.0?
PB: It is in the middle of it. While I4.0 involves all types of automation, both material and information based, Intelligent Automation focuses only on the information based one, which we also call the automation of knowledge work.
IA focuses on automating the work done by knowledge workers, whose principal capital is knowledge. Examples include programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, designers, public accountants, lawyers, and any other workers whose line of work requires them to “think for a living.” As opposed to manual labor, which is material-based (common in manufacturing industries), knowledge work is information-based and commonly found in service industries. Simply put, IA is the “white-collar” version of the “blue-collar” industrial automation, which started in the 19th century.
We demonstrate in the book that, today, knowledge work represents more than 80% of the global workforce. Hence we expect the impact of IA on our world to be as significant as the one of the previous industrial revolutions.
Thinkers360: In which industries and fields has IA been used so far? And what have been the impacts?
PB: Key business impacts include the improvement of business efficiency by 20 to 60%, the increase of client satisfaction by 50%, while improving significantly employee’s experience by automating or avoiding about 60% of the mundane tasks.
In terms of applicability, it is universal. IA provides strong benefits across functions and across industries. To demonstrate this, in the book, we have built the largest publicly available library of 500+ IA use case. It covers 8 functions and 5 industries.
While service industries (i.e. banking, insurance, telecommunications) have been leading in the adoption of IA, all industries are concerned, as all companies have at least support functions which can benefit a lot from IA (e.g. finance, HR, procurement).
Thinkers360: In what stage of Intelligent Automation’s adoption are most companies today?
PB: 86% of global business leaders recently surveyed believe that to stay ahead in their given domains, their organizations must deploy IA in the next five years. Because of its unique characteristics, we estimate that IA will be able to reach a level of adoption and sophistication in the next five years which took industrial automation over 200 years. According to a Deloitte survey, IA already has an adoption rate of over 50%. This rate is expected to increase to more than 70% in the next two years. If this continues, IA will have achieved near-universal adoption within the next five years.
Thinkers360: What are the most challenging things when adopting Intelligent Automation?
PB: SCALING! It is easy to succeed at implementing a proof of concept or a pilot. But when it is about scaling the transformation within an organization across several departments, functions or divisions, it becomes very hard. While 50% have started their journey in IA (according to Deloitte), only 15% have been able to implement it in more than 3 functions or divisions (according to McKinsey)
Thinkers360: How can companies succeed in scaling IA?
PB: According to our experience and research, companies which were successful had all implemented 5 initiatives:
To start with, the have implemented two fundamentals:
- Always put people in the center of an IA transformation: IA is built by people, for people. Without people there is no IA. Without IA there are still people.
- Start with a strong and healthy foundation: management support and sponsorship, capability building and change management
Then, they have implemented the below initiatives:
- Thirdly, combine the IA capabilities to create synergies, and be able to automate complex end to end processes
- Democratize IA by using technologies, such as low code platforms, that require limited skills to build IA applications. They make IA accessible to most business users. As a result, they accelerate the speed of the transformation, drive higher ownership and acceptance of IA, and allow the shift of the company culture to more digitalization and automation.
- Accelerate IA implementations by leveraging technology. For example, process discovery and process mining, data discovery, AutoML, and automated maintenance.
Thinkers360: How have IA transformations been impacted by COVID-19?
PB: Intelligent automation used to be a factor of competitiveness, where the companies which had implemented it were able to gain market share by selling cheaper and better products.
With the current COVID 19 crisis, IA it has become a factor of survival. Indeed, companies which are not digitalized and automated enough can’t survive in our new world. Companies that can’t sell products and services online, collect the cash online, motivate their employees remotely, and manage their operations remotely with minimal human intervention are only alive thanks to government subsidies.
Despite the devastating aspects of Covid-19, the pandemics has helped the world understand the importance of digitalizing processes enabling remote performance, and automating them to rely less on the human workforce and improve them.
Thinkers360: How does IA improve the employee experience?
PB: According to Gallup research, 85% of employees worldwide are not fulfilled by their work, because it is too manual, repetitive, and tedious. IA solves a large part of this issue by freeing up employees from repetitive and transactional tasks (e.g., keying in invoices in an accounting software). And it refocuses them on more value-added and exciting tasks (e.g., the ones involving insights, creativity). It also augments them, transforming them into superhumans able to generate insights from millions of data in a few seconds (e.g., identifying a tumor on an X-Ray in a few seconds). According to our research presented in the book, 30% of the current scope of work tasks can be augmented, while 70% can be either automated or eliminated (e.g. unproductive meetings or emails).
Thinkers360: How does IA improve the customer experience?
PB: Building trust, satisfying and retaining customers is critical for businesses. 96% of unhappy customers don’t bother complaining, and 91% of them will simply leave and never return. IA helps to create innovative and customized products, and highly responsive, omnichannel customer services available 24/7. Based on my experience with IA, companies can increase the level of their customer satisfaction by over 50%, while reducing the contact center workload by over 50%.
Thinkers360: How does IA save lives?
PB: IA has the potential to save millions of lives every year by supporting clinical trials and disease diagnosis, and avoiding medical errors. In developing countries, it can help reduce deaths from preventable causes (e.g., 1.6 million people died from diseases related to diarrhea in 2017) and compensate for the shortage of 4.3 million physicians globally, by enabling remote diagnosis. For example, IA application Tissue Analytics instantly diagnoses chronic wounds, burns, or skin conditions just by taking a photo from a smartphone.
Thinkers360: How can IA save money, and reallocate it to better uses?
PB: In addition, IA could have the potential to realize a $10 trillion of cost savings yearly, by reducing frauds, errors, and accidents. Indeed, IA not only makes transaction processes more efficient and reliable, but it also generates log files for every action, creating transparency and ease of compliance. Such a vast amount of money would allow us to double our global budget for education, help restore our planet from pollution, or even eliminate hunger!
Thinkers360: You’ve just published a new book you co-authored called Intelligent Automation, why did you write that book?
PB: First, it is about sharing a passion, a conviction that we can make our world more human with intelligent automation. Then it was a necessity. A need to inform and educate. Finally, while many books have been published in the fields of AI, machine learning, or robotics, a comprehensive reference guidebook had never yet been written on the topic of IA. Hence, it seemed critical to us to objectively document and build the latest insights on this field in a first reference document.
Thinkers360: What is the book about, what does it cover?
PB: The book covers the following:
✓ What is Intelligent Automation (IA)? Why has the use of IA been expanding so rapidly? What are the benefits it unleashes for people, companies, customers, and society?
✓ How can IA increase the resilience of our health and economic systems to safeguard people’s lives and livelihoods even in times of pandemics or crises?
✓ How have leading organizations been able to harness the full potential of IA, at scale, and generate massive efficiency gains in the range of 20 to 60%?
✓ How can IA save 10+ million lives per year, triple our global budget for education, eliminate hunger, or help protect our planet?
Thinkers360: Who is the book for?
PB:
- CEOs who want to understand what they can expect strategically from IA, how to build their roadmap, their business case, build their capabilities and ensure the success of their transformation.
- Project managers, developers, analysts, who want to understand the critical success factors in implementing technologies, leading practices in managing such a project, example of use cases, war stories… driving change management, communication, training…. Improving customer and employee experiences
- For everyone interested in the benefits generated and expected from IA on society, lives, education, health. Anyone who is interested in the future of work, and what it means for our society and for the future generations.
Thinkers360: Finally, tell us about your co-authors:
PB:
lan Barkin is Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at SYKES. He is a globally recognized thought leader and veteran in the IA space. Barkin co-founded Symphony Ventures, a pure-play IA consulting company providing cutting-edge services across all sectors. In 2018, the company was acquired for US$69 million by SYKES, a NASDAQ-listed global leader in Customer Engagement Services.
Dr. Jochen Wirtz is Vice-Dean MBA Programmes at the National University of Singapore Business School, and Professor of Marketing. He is a well-known and highly acclaimed author with more than 20 books published, including “Services Marketing – People, Technology, Strategy”. His research has been published in over 100 academic journal articles, and he received over 40 awards.
###
Join us on Thinkers360!
Thinkers360 is an opt-in network of the world’s foremost thought leaders — including academics, analysts, authors, consultants, influencers and speakers — with over 25M followers on social media combined. We are differentiated by our unique patent-pending algorithms that measure thought leadership and authentic influence looking far beyond social media alone.
Individuals: Connect and work with global brands as an author, influencer, speaker and more. Showcase your thought leadership profile and portfolio, build your media kit, and participate in our global leaderboards and opportunity marketplace: Sign-Up (free) | Newsletter
Enterprise (including brands & agencies): For brand, influencer, content marketing and speaker bureau services – working with our network of premier opt-in influencers with 25M+ followers on social media – or to showcase your own corporate executives, thought leaders and content: Request an Enterprise Consultation | Explainer Video | Newsletter
Want to discover and work with authors, influencers and speakers (including access to our unique thought leader reports and analytics, personal introductions, and our zero-transaction fee speaker bureau)? Contact us to discuss any of your thought leadership and B2B influencer marketing needs at info@thinkers360.com
For custom influencer lists, advertising and leaderboard sponsorship opportunities, please contact info@thinkers360.com.