Intelligent Automation Will Drive Digital Transformation In The Middle East

Milan Sheth, EVP-IMEA at Automation Anywhere reveals how the last year has affected the company’s growth and discusses its biggest successes.

What have been the most recent major breakthroughs in your company?

One of our biggest breakthroughs in 2020 was the launch of the Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface (AARI)—a smart digital assistant that brings personalized consumer experiences to the workplace by enabling all employees to participate in the automation of day-to-day business tasks. It operates like popular digital assistants Siri and Alexa but can be designed to handle various business processes from the front office to the back office. We are seeing many tangible benefits of AARI, such as reporting urgent requests, improving team collaboration and enhancing customer responses. AARI represents a significant next step in the evolution of automation in the workplace.

Do you think COVID-19 has accelerated technology adoption amongst corporates?

The COVID-19 pandemic fueled customer demand for automation to maintain business resilience and increase productivity. Over the last eight months, we’ve seen a greater urgency for automation by organizations that need to become more resilient to keep business moving and employees connected across teams and systems. This further validates a massive market opportunity and signals a seismic shift in the way we work, with automation at the forefront. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is now among one of the fastest-growing technologies we’ve seen in the last decade and its trajectory is driving our company’s growth as well.

Can you name some of the industry verticals that have accelerated automation adoption?

The pandemic created a greater urgency for businesses to become more resilient and this has accelerated their drive towards becoming fully-digital organizations. Many organizations were caught off guard by the COVID-19 pandemic and were forced to implement automation to maintain key business processes during the crisis. CIOs have told us that what they had planned to implement over a fiveyear horizon, they are now planning to do in one year. This is huge.

Post COVID-19, I believe that automation adoption will steadily increase year over year as organizations implement software bots to increase efficiencies in the front and back office.

We’ve seen accelerated adoption of automation across all industries as organizations work to keep employees connected across teams and systems while enabling remote work, and this will continue.

Automation Anywhere’s customer roster now includes nine out of 10 of the top public sector agencies, seven out of 10 of the top telecom companies, eight out of 10 of the top healthcare companies, six out of 10 of the top technology companies, and seven out of 10 of the top financial institutions.

During your conversations with C-level executives, what are they concerned about while adopting automation?

Automation technology is creating opportunities, paving the way for new and altered jobs, increasing productivity, and improving the delivery of public services. Therefore, we need to think about implications for hiring, reskilling, upskilling, lifelong learning, and reorganizing the way we think about jobs.

Preparing the world for the future workforce doesn’t just fall to academic institutions to empower the workers of tomorrow. Organizations must invest in reskilling programs to help today’s employees adapt and thrive in this new economic order. For example, at Automation Anywhere University we have trained more than 1.1 million developers, partners, analysts, students and employees in RPA. Imagine the impact if every large company launched similar programs—it would create a workforce well positioned for the 133 million new jobs of tomorrow.

In a technology puzzle, how crucial is automation, and what are the other technologies it can work with to form a solid business infrastructure?

By using bots to automate business processes, organizations can use human workers to focus on the higher-level, strategic, and empathetic work that they do best. Accelerated by COVID-19, we are seeing a lot more organizations deploying RPA, and particularly cloud-based RPA as a way to solve pain points brought on by a surge in manual processes.

Cloud-based RPA has emerged as a technology to help automate critical business processes with software bots, while companies recalibrate human labor and manual efforts.

Just a few years ago and especially before the pandemic, on-prem was considered the safer option to run business applications while cloud was considered risky. Today, with all of us working from home, this near-overnight switch to remote work is driving the adoption of cloud as the primary delivery model for intelligent automation. Cloud is now considered the safer choice, with on-prem becoming riskier and more costly. The clearest testament to this transformation towards cloud is the 600% growth that we have witnessed in the first half of 2020. In fact, we had as many as four cloud wins per day in the first half of 2020, signaling its rising importance.

What has 2020 been like for Automation Anywhere in the Middle East and what are your future plans?

The objective of entering the Middle East market was always to drive localized solutions to meet regional customer needs. There is a growing acceptance of automation in the Middle East, and 2020 has driven that further. Large-scale conglomerates are building on their RPA plans and accelerating efforts to strengthen business resiliency. Hybrid work culture is the way forward. Remote working and digital workers are increasingly becoming the norm in the region, so any intelligent automation tools that can enhance their service delivery and help them to perform better are now being implemented. We are seeing RPA implementations across finance, oil and gas, manufacturing and supply chain organizations. Enterprises are embarking on their digital transformation journeys and discovering and automating processes to improve productivity and customer experiences. The Middle East is going to be one of the fastest growing regions in the domain of automation in the immediate future, and we are happy to be part of that growth curve. The company’s investment in people, premises and partnerships in the region are well-placed to accelerate our growth momentum, aiding in the region’s digital transformation goals.

“Preparing the world for the future workforce doesn’t just fall to academic institutions to empower the workers of tomorrow. Organizations must invest in reskilling programs to help today’s employees adapt and thrive in this new economic order.”