By Bhaskar Ghosh, Rajendra Prasad, Gayathri Pallail
Practical guide to scaling intelligent automation
Subject
Themes
Intelligent automation represents a fundamental shift in how organisations create value. Where earlier waves of automation replaced manual labour on factory floors, the newest era targets intellectual work: machines that can analyse data, make decisions, and learn from outcomes now augment the information-processing tasks previously reserved for the human mind. A five-level maturity model maps this progression, from fragmented tool-driven experiments through process optimisation, robotic process automation, data-driven analytics, and finally AI-driven intelligence that enables self-learning systems at enterprise scale.
Intelligent automation represents a fundamental shift in how organisations create value. Where earlier waves of automation replaced manual labour on factory floors, the newest era targets intellectual work: machines that can analyse data, make decisions, and learn from outcomes now augment the…
Published in 2021 by three Accenture executives, The Automation Advantage arrives at a moment when the Covid-19 pandemic has forced organisations worldwide to confront their dependence on manual processes and legacy systems. The timing gives the work an urgency that business technology guides rarely…
Organisations do not arrive at intelligent automation in a single leap. A five-level maturity model provides the strategic compass for understanding where an enterprise currently stands and what capabilities it must build to advance. Each level represents not just a set of technologies but a…
A persistent fear shadows the march of intelligent automation: that machines will simply replace people, leaving workers redundant and economies devastated. A Brookings Institution study warns that up to a quarter of American jobs could be handed to machines. CIO Insight reports 60 percent of…
One of the most counterintuitive lessons in intelligent automation is that the best response to a seemingly automatable process is often not to automate it at all. A three-step framework provides the discipline: eradicate unnecessary work first, optimise what remains second, and only then automate…
As intelligent automation penetrates domains of heightened sensitivity, from medical diagnostics and government benefit payments to mortgage approvals and hiring decisions, the ethical stakes rise dramatically. Four pillars of responsible automation provide the guardrails: unbiased decisions,…
The Covid-19 pandemic delivered a brutal stress test to enterprise systems worldwide. Work stoppages rippled across continents. Supply chains fractured. Organisations discovered, often too late, that their information systems were brittle, built for stable conditions and unable to adapt when…
Automation has undergone a dramatic transformation since Ford engineering manager Del Harder coined the term in the 1940s to describe the replacement of assembly-line workers with machines. The Industrial Revolution had already introduced spinning jennies, power looms, and water frames, but…
An Accenture survey finds 84 percent of business executives believe AI is necessary for growth, yet 76 percent struggle to scale intelligent automation across their businesses. Five major barriers, organised around people, process, technology, and strategy, stand in the way. The first barrier is a…
A telecommunications company abandons waterfall methodology in favour of Agile and DevOps, applying intelligent automation end-to-end across its software development and testing processes. Automating many parts of development and testing gives the company a much better gauge of release readiness,…
A CIO at a large, decentralised enterprise discovers that business units across multiple acquisitions are reinventing wheels because they never communicate. After initiating conversations with other C-suite members to bridge the gap between IT strategy and business strategy, an automation assessment…
An automation operating model provides the essential link between strategic intent and execution. Rather than having individual project teams independently solve the same governance, vendor management, and process design questions repeatedly, a shared framework handles these cross-cutting concerns…
Most companies operate with legacy IT infrastructures built for a bygone era. Surveys of business and IT leaders cite architecture inflexibility as one of the biggest barriers to innovating at scale. Six architectural principles define how enterprises should build resilient, scalable automation…
A Brookings Institution study warns that up to a quarter of American jobs could be handed to machines. Low-skilled workers face the greatest risk, but even well-educated knowledge workers who spend part of their day on routine tasks will feel pressure. Yet most CEOs do not envision headcount…
Automation successes frequently stall once teams declare victory and move on. Lewis Carroll's Red Queen captures the predicament perfectly: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Solutions atrophy if they are not maintained, and capabilities turn into liabilities when not…
Three principles should guide every intelligent automation initiative as organisations look toward the future: relevance, resilience, and responsibility. Relevance means closing the gap between cutting-edge technology and the practical problems that customers and workers actually need solved.…
By Bhaskar Ghosh, Rajendra Prasad, Gayathri Pallail
Subject
Themes
Intelligent automation represents a fundamental shift in how organisations create value. Where earlier waves of automation replaced manual labour on factory floors, the newest era targets intellectual work: machines that can analyse data, make decisions, and learn from outcomes now augment the information-processing tasks previously reserved for the human mind. A five-level maturity model maps this progression, from fragmented tool-driven experiments through process optimisation, robotic process automation, data-driven analytics, and finally AI-driven intelligence that enables self-learning systems at enterprise scale.