The robot and I: How new digital technologies are making smart people and businesses smarter by automating rote work

To understand what the future holds for intelligent automation, we surveyed 537 North American and European organizations, ranging from banks and insurers (property/casualty/life), to healthcare payers (see methodology, page 22). Our findings reveal significant new trends. The first centers around the ability of intelligent automation to improve materially upon what people can do, as well as unlock meaning from data using process analytics. In some cases, organizations are automating work completely through digitization by re-imagining and instrumenting a process from its inception to harness the power of emerging digital technologies, such as social, mobile, analytics and cloud (or the SMAC StackTM). Our research also shows that through these technologies, humans are attaining new levels of process efficiency, such as improved operational cost, speed, accuracy and throughput volume. By using increasingly more astute technologies, smart businesses are doing a much better job of tackling complex process opportunities. In short, they are fast becoming force-multipliers to people who are still essential to process work in banking, healthcare, life sciences and insurance.