The year 2023 is set to be marked by global inflation, expected to hit 6.5 percent, resulting in market disruptions. Advances in technology can help businesses benefit by optimizing their processes and reducing the negative impact. We have compiled a list of insights and thoughts for the top trends in automation that are expected this year.
An innovative digital transformation is the approach for driving strategic transformation, innovation, and growth. Today’s leaders need to embrace a mindset of resilient, responsive, and dynamic strategy. They must be willing to assess their positioning more frequently than ever before and equip their organizations to thrive comfortably in an uncomfortable world.
We at Atomatik believe a better working digital transformational capability means addressing big, complex industry issues to deliver outcomes that grow, optimize, and provide a more qualified and better return on investment. Organizations in all industries are now taking bigger, transformative steps, redefining their purpose, embarking on end-to-end digital transformations, pursuing aggressive growth strategies, and learning how to achieve disruptive innovation. Here are the top five automation trends that we believe will reshape business in the next twelve months.
1. A renewed focus on processes
Revolutionary change in every organization is inevitable to compete in the current global economy. Like the industrial revolution, digital transformation is changing how we embrace, cultivate, and implement our way of working. Quick fixes will no longer suffice. Instead, organizations will need to think about innovative technologies that will give them the agility to adapt to change.
Organizations will have a renewed focus on processes in 2023. Business processes have been miscalculated and not given enough attention as the key focus was technology such as robotic process automation (RPA) and process mining. While technology drives competitive advantage, it is created, and should be considered, as the enabler for business process efficiency.
Operational excellence will become important for companies, as this is the foundation for any further technology scaling and efficiency benefits. We expect the process-focused approach to be a growing mindset in organizations.
C-suites and governing boards will facilitate a return to process fundamentals. Using advanced technologies as enablers for true transformation, the focus will be on improving customer experience.
We believe the need for integration of process improvement efforts and automation, or RPA goals will be prioritized over having separated objectives and pipelines.
2. RPA, AI, and Citizen Development will play a critical role
There will be a focus on automation technology to solve operational problems due to economic trends and the focus on cost and speed will be immense. Our experts believe in 2023 there will be a consolidation exercise that follows from the post-pandemic, in terms of business process digitization. It will see the elimination of all unnecessary touchpoints, transforming from an activity and functional focus to an ‘as-a-service’ approach.
More organizations will further group their business processes to reduce citizen development barriers and enable their citizen and semi-pro developer communities to digitize processes at a faster pace. Based on achievements and highlights in 2022, we expect that artificial intelligence (AI) processes and capabilities will become increasingly available for companies of all sizes. Its adoption will become much easier, scalable, and beneficial for them. Organizations will look to increase their automation spending in 2023 to simplify their business operations and tackle upcoming economic challenges.
Three key automation themes will drive the simplification process for robot resilience, process orchestration, and AI-infused automation. AI will be at the center of every conversation. Forward-thinking companies must deploy automation effectively to tackle inflation, looming recession, and other economic challenges in 2023.
3. Acceleration of Low-code / no-code platforms
The marketplace for low-code / no-code solutions has come a long way since it first came on the intelligent automation scene. Our research has found that compared to the past 2 years, more organizations are now leveraging low-code / no-code platforms to support their goals.
Previously, specialists in the intelligent automation space have conveyed disbelief when it came to low-code / no-code automation, and not without good reason. If improperly implemented, not only can such tools increase technical debt and process complexity, but they can also lead to vendor lock-in.
Low-code / no-code tools have simply helped fill a gap where skilled programming talent is hard to come by. As well as enabling expert software engineers and developer coders in building automations more efficiently, these tools have also opened the doors to non-IT professionals. Leveraging low-code / no-code tools, these “citizen developers” now build simple process automations and applications with minimal help from IT.
Going forward, we expect low-code tools to become increasingly universal. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies, representing a significant increase from 25% in 2020.
4. Increasing budget for the adoption of hyper-automation
Along with intelligent automation, organizations are looking to invest more in hyper-automation rather than just leveraging RPA solely. Over the last year, there has been an increasing number of organizations that currently are or plan to invest in hyper-automation in 2023. It is predicted that organizations are expecting their budgets for hyper-automation to either increase or stagnate over the next year.
These findings align with recent research conducted by Salesforce and Vanson Bourne which predicts that 80% of organizations will include hyper-automation on their technology roadmap by 2025.
Rather than any technology hyper-automation encompasses multiple digital transformation technologies and techniques including RPA, AI, process mining, workflow automation, advanced analytics, automated process discovery, iPaaS, and machine learning. The term also implies a holistic, studied, and mature approach to automation.
As organizations increasingly focus on enterprise, it is expected they will be looking to gradually embrace hyper-automation in the years to come.
5. Workflow process orchestration will grow
Automation technologies have thrived over the years, meaning more enterprise organizations have multiple intelligent automation tools and systems in play. These tools are, of course, interacting with employees of all types. Digital workers, human workers, and intelligent automation systems require orchestration and scheduling. Much as the data integration layer was created years ago, it is time now for Business Process Orchestration, to become a must-have.
As workflow automation and orchestration tools are key components of digital transformation, we have seen growth across all workflow solutions in terms of budgets and adoption rates. We are also noticing workflow automation and orchestration technologies becoming increasingly accessible on a regular basis.
Not only has there been an explosion of standalone low-code workflow automation tools entering the market, but enterprise platforms are increasingly offering low-code workflow automation features. Tools like Atomatik offer no-code workflow automation that enables users to automate basic tasks such as onboarding communications, basic PDF creation, and email forwarding.
Behind the scenes, workflow automation and orchestration tools continue to drive IT transformation. From microservices orchestration to event automation, organizations increasingly rely on workflow engines to harmonize and automate some of their most high-value, mission-critical processes.
With economic unease in sight, organizations are increasing their efforts to navigate predictable challenges with minimum damage. Automation tools, as these trends reflect, are expected to play an important role in this endeavor.
Looking to adopt no-code automation in 2023? Learn more about what Atomatik can accomplish for your organization, get in touch with our sales team today.
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