The Benefits of Hyperautomation for Today’s Business

Hyperautomation has been a hot topic since Gartner introduced the phrase to the world in 2020.  In Gartner’s words, “Hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.”

Gartner has named hyperautomation as one of the top technology trends for 2020, 2021, and now 2022, predicting it will play a significant role in the years ahead to help lower organizations’ operating costs and find new revenue sources.

We wrote about hyperautomation earlier this year. Now, we’d like to take a deeper dive to show you when you should use it and the benefits you’ll reap.

How does hyperautomation differ from other types of automation, in particular intelligent automation? Hyperautomation is a high-level concept that integrates a broad range of digital technologies to automate more aspects of your business in more ways.

Intelligent automation is actually a subset of hyperautomation. It brings together Robotic Process Automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), process discovery, and analytics to automate processes. Hyperautomation, on the other hand, is a more holistic concept—that can involve organizational restructuring or cultural transformation and include advanced technologies such as computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) that could be beyond the scope of intelligent automation.

When you should use hyperautomation

What kind of situation or challenge triggers the need for hyperautomation? Here are a few ones that stand out.

Process unstructured data

Accessing, processing, and analyzing structured data is straightforward. But doing the same with unstructured data is not. But as has been widely reported, 80% of enterprise data is unstructured. This represents a lot of valuable data that is being ignored by businesses because it’s too difficult to process.

Unstructured data includes such things as phone call transcriptions, emails, texts, social media comments, and even video and audio recordings. This requires hyperautomation and its special AI technology such as NLP, optical character recognition (OCR), pattern recognition, computer vision, and voice recognition to process. By combining all these capabilities, hyperautomation can help you extract real value from your unstructured data.

Connect business applications

Today’s markets won’t stop just because you’re still manually extracting data from your existing legacy solutions—customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, or core logistics systems, among others—to integrate with data from other systems, including cloud-based ones. You need seamless automated operations across all your applications, no matter what environment they run on.

Connecting business applications is relatively simple when they have application programming interfaces (APIs) or built-in connectors. However, many legacy applications don’t have those and can be accessed only via a graphical user interface (GUI). And for terminal or virtual environments, when the system won’t permit direct access to a GUI, your only path to integration is to parse information on the screen—which requires specialized machine learning technology.

Hyperautomation brings together machine learning, computer vision, deep learning, and other advanced technologies to help you solve the legacy integration challenge.

Analyze data and make decisions

Unlike basic RPA software robots (“bots”), bots created in a hyperautomation environment can do much more than just automate simple processes. Although analyzing data and making decisions have traditionally been actions performed by humans, that’s now changed. Hyperautomation tools can collect and analyze business data extracted from your legacy systems and visualize the results for easy comprehension.

Additionally, by applying deep learning algorithms to big data, you can even do predictive analyses that help you anticipate what is likely to happen. For instance, hyperautomation can be used by insurance companies to detect fraudulent claims and even to make independent decisions about whether to approve a particular claim.

Observe, learn about, and automate business processes

Hyperautomation tools can also do “process discovery,’ that is, automatically analyzing what humans do to complete a process and identifying repetitive patterns that could be automated. This kind of analysis and identification can only be done with hyperautomation, as it needs advanced technologies like pattern recognition and optimization algorithms to work properly. Such tools can also, after identifying business processes to be automated, prioritize them based on the fastest and highest return on investment (ROI).

Automate “long-tail” tasks

The “long tail” refers to the statistical points on a graph that are in themselves small, but when lumped together, add up to an impressive number. An example of long-tail tasks would be all the little things you have to do in your job during the day: answer emails, go to status meetings, make appointments for other meetings, and so on. If you added up all the time spent on these “small tasks,” you’d see that they occupy much of your time—and that many of them are repetitive tasks that could easily be automated.  

One of the things that hyperautomation does particularly well is to enable business users to automate long-tail tasks. Called citizen developers, these non-technical employees, and by giving them hyperautomation tools, democratize bot development.

The benefits of hyperautomation

Hyperautomation benefits include all the benefits you’d get from deploying RPA and intelligent RPA, plus more. Here are some of them:

• Be more efficient. Automate more processes—complex ones as well as simple ones—across your business.
  
  
• Optimize workflows. Seek the most efficient ways to complete tasks.
  
  
• Reduce costs. Automate tasks that require manual work or intervention to save employee time.
  
  
• Boost agility. Offer quicker, richer insights for better decision-making.
  
  
• Improve quality. Eliminate human errors and increase consistency.
  
  
• Free up IT. Minimize the time IT has to spend configuring and managing automation tools and solutions.

Hyperautomation is especially beneficial for businesses that still have legacy systems that don’t talk to one another. Using hyperautomation tools, the businesses will see dramatic results, increasing connectivity, agility, and efficiency of business operations.