Intelligent automation uses advanced AI to give humans the gift of time
Mike Gilfix is VP of IBM Automation and Chief Product Officer, ensuring a close alignment between IBM Cloud offerings and the needs of clients.
A: Automation is the gift of time. It’s an opportunity for people in many different roles to use their time differently to create more value. It’s an opportunity to dramatically unlock the power of labor to focus on what matters most.
Just think of the things you’re spending time doing every day; how many do you actually want to put on your resume? Most are probably low-level tasks. Imagine a customer advisor in any industry; do you think they want to put “I entered 50 clients into my database today” or “I filed my TPS reports today” on their resume? Or would they rather write, “I recruited five new customers today ” and “I grew my book of business by X amount”? Intelligent automation can handle low-level tasks so you can spend more time focusing on the things that deliver those meaningful results.
A: Intelligent automation—or hyperautomation or extreme automation, as it’s also called—is different because it’s not just mechanical in nature. It focuses on information, using artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud technology. We’ve had automation for mechanical processes and some simple clerical tasks for a long time. But in the last few years, intelligent automation has advanced to the point where it can now help achieve important goals in other vital areas—including information technology roles and business roles. The common thread in these roles is that they’re information-centric in nature.
Given the proliferation of data in the digital era, without intelligent automation, many of us would spend our days sifting through piles of info just to figure out what is actionable. Instead, AI can now quickly process and synthesize vast amounts of data for us, using algorithms to determine the next steps needed. This lets people spend more time on the things that truly matter, such as human judgment, empathy, relationships, creativity and ideas.
Scale is another difference. Traditional automation typically focuses on isolated low-value tasks, while intelligent automation operates at the organizational level and spans the entire enterprise. It leverages powerful information-centric processing to comprehensively rethink the workflows between people and machines—bringing both together into a new way of working, a new seamless operating model.
A: Absolutely. AI is accelerating automation. We’ve recently hit a critical convergence of key technologies such visual recognition, natural language processing and machine learning, and these have opened up incredible new possibilities. Just five years ago, those three technologies were in their infancy, but now they’re becoming mainstream. They power tons of different AI technologies that can be applied in many different scenarios.
Automation in IT is especially important because every business is digital now.
