Quanton's World of Business Process Automation

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.

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.

When you look at RPA or content intelligence, there are so many organisations doing it wrong, making huge mistakes and giving Robotic Process Automation and content intelligence a bad name. Why? In so many cases it comes down to one simple thing: They’ve forgotten the people part of the equation.

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. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have become two of the most hyped technologies of the year and for many, there’s confusion around how they differ from Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

There’s certainly plenty of overlap - RPA can include ML or AI. But there are also distinctly unique with significant differences and despite the hype around AI, much bigger strides are being made with automation technologies such as RPA. More importantly RPA will be a critical platform to help organisations prepare for the benefits of AI and ML. We hit this topic in an exclusive podcast below and we're looking forward to hearing Professor Willcocks get into the details at our exclusive event on November 29th.  

We’ve all seen the headlines: The robots are coming to steal our jobs! It’s a great story for the sake of headlines, but recently we’ve seen three major studies which show that, in fact, robotic automation will lead to job gains.

The robots are coming... and if we get it right, they will bring with them new and interesting jobs and the end of mundane, repetitive tasks. 

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.