Hyperautomation will revolutionise work – but what exactly is it?

Hyper­automa­tion has been thrust into the spot­light for the sec­ond time in six months by Gart­ner. In Octo­ber 2020, the research giant named it as one of its top strate­gic tech­nol­o­gy trends for 2021. Its lat­est report on the sub­ject, pub­lished at the end of April, fore­casts that the glob­al mar­ket that enables hyper­automa­tion will be worth almost £430bn in 2022 – a 24% increase on the pre­vi­ous year’s fig­ure. 

“Hyper­automa­tion has shift­ed from an option to a con­di­tion of sur­vival,” says Fab­rizio Bis­cot­ti, research vice-pres­i­dent at Gart­ner. 

But what is hyper­automa­tion, why is it gen­er­at­ing such inter­est now, and – most cru­cial­ly – how can busi­ness­es best har­ness its poten­tial? 

In essence, hyper­automa­tion is a strat­e­gy that enter­pris­es adopt to quick­ly iden­ti­fy, vet and auto­mate as many process­es as pos­si­ble, apply­ing a dis­ci­plined, holis­tic approach and mix of tech­nolo­gies. It spans the whole spec­trum of oper­a­tions, using dig­i­tal tools to sim­pli­fy many time-con­sum­ing tasks. These tools include AI sys­tems, robot­ic process automa­tion (RPA), low-code appli­ca­tion plat­forms and vir­tu­al assis­tants. 

The con­cept is becom­ing increas­ing­ly rel­e­vant, Bis­cot­ti says, because organ­i­sa­tions will “require more IT and busi­ness process automa­tion as they are forced to accel­er­ate their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion plans in a post-Covid, dig­i­tal-first world”. 

Gartner’s Octo­ber 2020 report had not­ed: “Many organ­i­sa­tions are sup­port­ed by a patch­work of tech­nolo­gies that are not lean, opti­mised, con­nect­ed, clean or explic­it. At the same time, the accel­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal busi­ness requires effi­cien­cy, speed and democ­ra­ti­za­tion. Organ­i­sa­tions that don’t focus on effi­cien­cy, effi­ca­cy and busi­ness agili­ty will be left behind.”

Tackling low-hanging fruit

Peter van der Put­ten is direc­tor of AI solu­tions at cloud soft­ware firm Pegasys­tems and an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of AI at Lei­den Uni­ver­si­ty in the Nether­lands. He sug­gests that the dri­ve towards hyper­automa­tion has been “gath­er­ing pace for a while as the tech­nolo­gies have matured”. 

Their simul­ta­ne­ous emer­gence has cre­at­ed far-reach­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties. There is low-hang­ing fruit to be gob­bled by busi­ness lead­ers, he says, although those who invest heav­i­ly in hyper­automa­tion stand to gain the most from it.

“There is more to hyper­automa­tion than stream­lin­ing work­flows to save time and reduce cost,” van der Put­ten stress­es. “There are strate­gies that busi­ness­es can use to link automa­tion with busi­ness out­comes more direct­ly. Real­is­ing the poten­tial of hyper­automa­tion hinges on robust gov­er­nance and the qual­i­ty of exec­u­tive-lev­el sup­port – how it is imple­ment­ed across an organ­i­sa­tion and not in nar­row nich­es.”

For instance, the abil­i­ty to man­age excep­tions through AI enables finance, IT and gov­er­nance experts to deliv­er val­ue for indus­tries that already use new net­works or decen­tralised cloud ser­vices. A recent glob­al sur­vey of 1,300 busi­ness lead­ers by Pegasys­tems iden­ti­fied key areas where hyper­automa­tion has already been ben­e­fit­ing finan­cial ser­vices providers. Respon­dents report­ed achiev­ing quick wins in a num­ber of func­tions, includ­ing finance, data man­age­ment and pro­duc­tion. They expect to see sig­nif­i­cant advances in areas such as sup­ply chains and “part­ner ecosys­tems” over the next five years.

As an exam­ple of what’s pos­si­ble with hyper­automa­tion, take cred­it bro­ker Loan.co.uk. The busi­ness, which has been build­ing intel­li­gent sys­tems since 2014, has trans­formed mort­gage lend­ing from a process that’s tra­di­tion­al­ly been opaque, com­plex and painful­ly slow. The total automa­tion improve­ments to date have “saved our 40 advis­ers and proces­sors on aver­age three hours and 45 min­utes a day”, reports CEO Paul McGer­ri­g­an.

The company’s AI helper, Albot, can search thou­sands of lenders’ offers in less than a sec­ond while match­ing more than 10,000 cri­te­ria, deliv­er­ing the low­est rate appro­pri­ate for the applicant’s cir­cum­stances. 

“Our smart AI under­writer can ful­ly under­write about 100 cas­es in 30 sec­onds, includ­ing cred­it search­es,” McGer­ri­g­an says. “Pre­vi­ous­ly, it would have tak­en an advis­er 20 min­utes to under­write one com­plex case.” 

A workplace revolution

The company’s new approach has sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased trans­paren­cy and, in turn, engen­dered greater trust among its cus­tomers. McGer­ri­g­an urges oth­er com­pa­nies to embrace hyper­automa­tion, which, he says, “will do to the knowl­edge work­er what the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion did to the man­u­al work­er. We are see­ing the largest shift in how we work in 100 years. Most firms have been tak­en by sur­prise at the speed of change, while some are still asleep.”

Guy Kirk­wood, chief evan­ge­list at UiPath, an RPA soft­ware provider, agrees that the poten­tial for hyper­automa­tion is huge. “In the US alone, 2.6 tril­lion hours of work a year are automat­able,” he says, not­ing that the pan­dem­ic-induced lock­downs have added impe­tus to the trend. 

“Work will be rev­o­lu­tionised,” Kirk­wood pre­dicts. “Almost over night, employ­ees were expect­ed to work from home, deal with unfavourable eco­nom­ic con­di­tions and han­dle a huge rise in their work­loads in areas such as cus­tomer ser­vice and data entry. Many turned to automa­tion to adapt.”

He points to a firm pro­vid­ing smart infra­struc­ture that used to print, sign, scan and upload 400,000 invoic­es a year man­u­al­ly. The busi­ness “now has a robot that per­forms these tasks dig­i­tal­ly. This means that no employ­ee needs to phys­i­cal­ly be in the office to process an invoice.”

Now that busi­ness­es have been cat­a­pult­ed into the dig­i­tal age, regard­less of their indus­try, we are on the verge of a new era of work in which hyper­automa­tion will play a much greater role. Com­pa­nies that make the leap today and go big on automa­tion will be win­ners tomor­row.