Quanton's World of Business Process Automation

Qualifying Robotic Process Automation with help from UiPath's Martin Milthorpe

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market, according to analyst firm Gartner, but like any technology, it has had its growing pains. While there are a number of local success stories, most local companies have yet to fully harness the potential of the technology.

Digital process automation is real; With a rapidly evolving market and technological changes local businesses have to adopt future-ready operating models to remain relevant and sustainable. And business process automation is one important tool which offers that. Kiwi businesses need to consider how they’re going to embrace it to remain competitive.

Here’s our view on the top 5 digital process automation trends that will shape 2020 – and ways which Kiwi businesses can capitalise on them.

Conversational AI is a growth area, offering new ears and a mouth for virtual assistants. Add in new arms and legs with automation and Kiwi businesses could reap big returns.

Last Friday I attended the pwc HeraldTalks November event – The Tech Revolution. As a takeaways I grabbed three novel ideas and questions that can help businesses take a different view on how to apply technology to their operating models or how to start thinking about digital transformation from a new perspective.

Automation is undoubtedly on the agenda of most executives in New Zealand. Enabled by a wider ecosystem of smart technologies, Intelligent Process Automation is the destination making AI one of the hottest words of 2019.

In September I travelled to America to attend the San Francisco Ai Summit – self-proclaimed the world’s largest AI event for business. At the event I joined several thousand attendees to hear from over 200 speakers and engage with over 200 exhibitors.

The aim was to bring back key learning to be translated into practical insights to share and help move New Zealand businesses forward in the adoption and application of smart technologies – something key to Quanton’s drive.

Eight technology enablers exist, which when holistically present in a technology mix will provide business leaders with the opportunity to drive short-term business benefit while creating a platform for sustainable digital transformation.

Quanton is excited to officially announce our partnership with ABBYY to provide New Zealand businesses Content Intelligence in Process Automation.

The new partnership will help New Zealand businesses gain the benefits of Optical Character Recognition, Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), which when combined with Robotic Process Automation, will extend the potential breadth and depth of automation and digitally transform operating models. 

Last week I attended DX2019 as a sponsor and speaker. My own talk focused on how businesses can couple short-term benefit with long-term transformation and how Robotic Process Automation can be scaled with Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, a topic which is captured in a white paper by ABBYY, New Technologies Give Rise to Content Intelligence. The paper focuses on how content intelligence will power the future of Robotic Process Automation. 

Throughout the day I made a point to drop in on talks from several other amazing people including Roxanne Salton (Mercury Energy), Tom Cochran (Former Digital Leader – Obama Administration) and Luke Longney (Vodafone NZ).

Reflecting on their talks, I wanted to share the lessons I gleaned from these speakers, that they have learned from their own digital transformation journeys. 

On September 27^th, 2018 Quanton hosted our inaugural DX Seminar. One of the exciting speakers was Asa Cox who discussed the very exciting topic of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence.

Following the recent opinion piece on RPA as a foundation for AI by Garry Green we wanted to continue to address the conversation around RPA and AI with three ways AI and RPA will extend the reach of automation in our organisation.

Building on the success of a significant event in September Quanton is excited to announce the next conference in the DX Seminar series, headlined by renowned global Robotic Process Automation expert Professor Leslie Willcocks from the London School of Economics.