Majority of organisations plan automation investment

New survey reveals that 48% accelerated automation projects as a result of the pandemic, with cost savings, customer satisfaction, and employee productivity as primary drivers.

New research published by SnapLogic reveals that 78% of businesses plan to increase their spending on automation initiatives in the coming 12 months. The new study also found that this increased spending comes after a year in which 48% of IT Decision Makers (ITDMs) already accelerated their automation projects as a result of the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The new research, which was conducted across the US and UK, found that cost savings were the primary driver behind new automation initiatives, according to 63% of ITDMs. However, other benefits were cited, with 60% employing automation to increase customer engagement and satisfaction, and 59% using automation to drive employee productivity. Notably, signaling a difference in how the two markets view the benefits of automation, 63% of US ITDMs adopted automation to grow topline revenues in comparison to just 38% of those in the UK.

“In conversation with customers, as well as peers in the industry, it’s clear that automation has helped many businesses adapt and respond to the disruption caused by COVID-19,” said Craig Stewart, CTO at SnapLogic. “Automation has not only saved organizations time and money, but it’s also facilitated faster response times to business demands. This has enabled employees to focus on value-adding tasks over the mundane, repetitive ones, which in turn has helped organizations more quickly meet changing customer expectations. With uptake anticipated to increase in the coming year, it is essential for IT and business leaders to equip themselves with the right strategies, tools, and best practices to implement automation to its full effect.”

Automation is occurring within IT and across different lines of business. According to ITDMs, 68% focused their initial projects on automating IT processes before extending their learnings to lines of business. However, again, there were differences between the UK and US respondents, with those in the UK almost four times more likely to focus their first projects on financial processes or sales processes compared to those in the US. But, encouragingly, nearly all (98%) agree that it’s important to take an enterprise-wide approach to automation rather than rushing into one-off, isolated projects that won’t scale.

While businesses acknowledge the benefits of automation and are investing accordingly, there are still hurdles to overcome. When asked if anything was hampering the rollout of their automation initiatives, legacy technology (55%), a lack of internal skills (40%), a shift to remote working (40%), and compliance issues (37%) were called out as the biggest challenges for ITDMs.

Getting the right technology stack in place is essential for those undertaking automation initiatives. The most critical items for that toolkit were an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution (54%) and BPM (business process management) technologies (53%). Notably, just 21% called out RPA (robotic process automation) technologies as a required part of their enterprise automation toolkit.

Enthusiasm about enterprise AI negated by employee concerns over skills and making mistakes.
Mphasis, an Information Technology (IT) solutions provider specializing in applied technology and business process services, has formed a strategic partnership with Kore.ai, the leading enterprise conversational AI platform and solutions company, to bolster its offerings to transform customer experience management and employee engagement for their enterprise clients.
IoT Readiness Framework provides an objective technical standard that allows organisations to compare project performance with others in their industry vertical.
NVIDIA has announced that the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip is in full production, set to power systems coming online worldwide to run complex AI and HPC workloads.
Marking its fifth-year milestone, the partnership continues to push the boundaries of digital innovations to propel the game into the future.
AI pioneer unveils new generative AI analyst designed to democratize security and help every user — from novice to expert — operate like a seasoned security professional.
NVIDIA is integrating its NVIDIA AI Enterprise software into Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning to help enterprises accelerate their AI initiatives.
SambaNova DataScale® deployed to accelerate the performance of global supercomputers.