By Vikram Goyal, Senior Director, WNS Vuram
Adapting to the new normal, recent times witnessed digital transformation journeys across industries with organizations racing to adopt best practices and technologies for resilience and business continuity. 2022 witnessed prolific growth and innovation in the technology sector, especially in hyper-automation. Ranging from artificial intelligence, intelligent automation, process mining, and low-code/no-code, technology adoption was the driving force for digital transformation journeys by several organizations.
Now, hyper-automation is expected to remain in the spotlight in 2023 impacting the world around us. The following are the significant trends that will make an impact on businesses in the coming future.
Metaverse: the new entrant to the tech space
Metaverse is a relatively new concept that’s been hitting the mainstream. It is worth mentioning that hyper-automation has already laid the groundwork in a way by fostering collaboration between people, processes, and data through an amalgamation of automation technologies comprising artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), low-code/no-code, etc. Similarly, Metaverse is the virtual world that enables people to interact, learn, work, sell and socialize by combining technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), AI, 5G networks, etc. Talking about human-AI relationships, Metaverse is much “evolved” and coming-of-age technology, for which hyper-automation has set the foundation.
For businesses, this means offering a valuable immersive experience for customers. Imagine the digital avatars in a healthcare setting, where patient experience centers can leverage chatbots to schedule appointments for teleconsultation in a virtual clinic. For fintech and banking, there’s a huge avenue of opportunities. A financial hub where customers can interact with banking representatives in a virtual branch, and digital humans who can provide multilingual assistance 24×7, to name a few. Interestingly, the business’ and consumers’ annual global spending related to Metaverse could reach to whooping $5 trillion by 2030, according to a study by McKinsey.
Super apps set to sweep super disruption
Think of it as a digital Swiss army knife, as leading industry analysts and researchers call it. Super apps are a set of all-in-one tools, in a single application, that a user needs and has the flexibility to add and remove whenever needed. For organizations that want to attract and retain young talent predominantly millennials and gen-z, who demand a consumer-like, mobile-first, real-life experience even in workplaces, super apps will perfectly fit the bill. The reason being Super Apps work as an instant messaging platform to facilitate streamlined communication among employees working in a hybrid culture. These apps can also empower human resource teams with a centralized leave management system with real-time leave tracking options, and features to maintain employee records in one place, among others.
As Super Apps is a complete single ecosystem of applications that a user has on their phone to meet all their digital needs, businesses can use the apps to expand their customer base and look to enhance customer loyalty. Through Super, Apps businesses can access valuable customer data and apply data analytics tools to turn it into a gold mine to understand the kind of products customers are interested in and personalize with cross-promotion discounts to increase conversions.
A new wave of intelligent automation: AI-driven Generative design
Hyperautomation is propelling the advancement of AI in different functions. One that is being widely spoken about is generative design. With this AI-augmented design technology, the conventional, rigid, and interactive processes involved in designing applications, user flows, screen models, and presentation layer codes for digital products can be automated. Powered by natural language processing (NLP) and ML capabilities, this intelligent design technology provides a plethora of design alternatives for engineers based on their inputs of style, cost, strength, weight, and other parameters of the product. This leaves the designers with ample time to focus more on the customers’ pain points and work on “what” they want instead of spending the majority of time on “how” to make it work.
Machine learning-based code generators
The beauty of ML-based code generation tools is that they come with cloud-hosted ML models that can just be plugged into the professional developer’s integrated development environments. The models provide code suggestions based either on natural language descriptions or the provided partial code fragments. Different providers are offering a range of capabilities and options – such as codes in over a dozen languages, models trained on billions of lines of code that are available in public repositories, autocompletion of codes when the target function name is given, generation of a summary of the code description, open source code models, etc. Some are also exclusively designed for data scientists for generating visualizations and complex codes.
Optimized process mining
At a beginner’s level, process mining is about discovering automation opportunities internally to improve customer satisfaction and efficiency. But going a step further, applying predictive, actionable process mining techniques can provide greater insights into customer behavior. Advanced process mining involves the analysis of multiple processes simultaneously, which is otherwise complex and time-consuming. This gives results on how each process is connected to the others and how they interact with each other. A seamless integration of process mining platforms, ML algorithms, and the digital twin of the organization with customer service applications can help business owners access customer data to improve internal operations.
The way forward is hyper-automation will remain a lucrative tech opportunity for entrepreneurs and industry leaders. It offers significant benefits such as enhanced collaboration among team members, a unified environment of business, data, and people, better decision-making capabilities, and better cost savings.