Category: Uncategorized

Jan 10, 2022 by Automation Hero

When we think of automation, we often picture robots in factories, or self-checkout stations at the grocery store. Where we don’t envision the technology is in accounts payable departments, even though they are among the biggest benefactors of a movement toward more efficient workflows. 

According to the Institute of Financial Management, 77% of surveyed accounts payable departments have already invested in some form of invoice processing automation software, as well as other workflow automation solutions. This has led to untold improvements in productivity, worker engagement, and even profitability. 

But traditional automation capabilities, like those offered by robotic process automation (RPA), still require time-consuming manual tasks, especially when it comes to processing information. What if there was a way to close the gap for more end-to-end automation? 

Leveling up automation with intelligent document processing

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is a category of automation solutions that can capture, extract, and organize data from a wide variety of sources, including printed text and images, digital documents like PDFs, and even human handwriting. Software like Automation Hero can do this, plus input it into a  workflow for complete end-to-end automation.  

A survey by AP & P2P found that only 30% of invoices that respondents receive from their vendors are in a digital format, leaving 70% that require some degree of manual uploading prior to being processed. IDP drastically reduces the amount of tedious work accounts payable professionals have to engage in, and it can easily digitize and contextualize a lot of the data that RPA fundamentally can’t understand, enabling even more end-to-end automation. 

The top IDP benefits of accounts payable are:

Enhanced Productivity

How much time does your team spend manually reviewing invoices, even when you have an RPA or other automation system in place? Are there any busy seasons when this gets especially cumbersome? When IDP is implemented in your process, it can cut down the time-consuming mental work that goes into capturing, converting, sorting, responding to or routing data, and streamline it into a process that just takes a few clicks. This leaves your team with more time to focus on important or critical tasks.  

Increased Approval Speeds

Most payment delays don’t come from lack of funds — they result from labor constraints. Unfortunately, when invoice approvals get backed up, it can harm relationships with vendors. IDP removes a lot of the time and effort barriers that can lead to these delays, so it’s easier to make payments on time with less risk of human error. 

Insight Into Processes

How much time does it take to process each invoice? Unless you’re timing a worker with a stopwatch, you probably won’t know exactly how long the work takes outside of your RPA. With IDP implemented, more of your accounts payable processes are measured by machines, giving you insight into how long everything takes — as well as what you might change to smooth things out. IDP can complement your RPA and in turn save a lot of time by removing your manual processes, but when you streamline the work these systems need to do, you can reach new heights of efficiency.

Automation Hero: Truly intelligent IDP for accounts payable

Not all IDPs are created equal. Legacy systems rely on templates for accurate data labeling, which doesn’t work for companies that process many different invoice formats. Newer programs allegedly use artificial intelligence, but they’re incredibly expensive and labor-intensive to set up, and are limited to only a few IDP functions, such as OCR and extraction, or classification.  

Automation Hero is a new kind of automation platform, powered by deep learning AI, to build upon the capabilities of RPA and IDP with a single, end-to-end system. Free of templates, Automation Hero can read and contextualize any kind of data, and learn from users to quickly improve accuracy. Incredibly versatile and even multilingual, the platform can plug into your existing systems to streamline processes, or serve as an entire enterprise management dashboard. With a consumption-based pricing model, you only pay for the automations you use. 

Learn more about how Automation Hero can streamline your accounts payable department in our new eBook covering invoice processing automation.

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Learn how we helped Markerstudy reduce its claims processing time by 40%. Additionally, learn how we reduced total claim processing time by 80% for another multinational insurance partner — cutting down manual tasks from 10 minutes to just two minutes per claim.

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Jan 10, 2022 by Automation Hero

Invoice processing automation has been one of the biggest breakthroughs for accounts payable departments since the advent of computers. Digital approval workflows have reduced the amount of labor that goes into processing each invoice by cutting out steps like manual notifications, routing and identifying expensive errors. But as high-volume accounts payable teams already know, the work of processing invoices begins before a document is ever reviewed. 

The rise of intelligent data extraction

In the past, accounts payable departments only had to manage one channel for invoice traffic: their mailboxes. Invoices simply arrived in paper form, and AP employees piled them high on their desks.

Now there’s a dizzying array of channels for invoices to travel through. Email attachments are one of the most popular invoice submission methods for enterprises of every size, while larger organizations may require submissions through online forms or portals. Vendors regularly deploy file systems, like Dropbox, for submissions. 

AP departments struggle with two things in this environment: 

1. Capturing invoices efficiently through all channels
2. Accurately extracting data from different document formats

Intelligent document processing (IDP) solutions are a more recent class of automation capabilities that specialize in extracting data from complex documents like invoices and converting that data into a usable format. Optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities allow them to read and automatically convert text from PDFs, emails, images, and even handwritten content. This still leaves considerable work for AP departments to manually capture invoices.

Unlock potential with automated integrations

With all the success AP departments have had with approval automation and data extraction, initial capture is still time consuming. Using automation tools that integrate with an organization’s many invoice channels is key to maximizing productivity. At the minimum, they need to have the capacity to access invoices from every source, like email platforms, file systems, ERP platforms, and databases.

This allows the IDP to read emails, route communications, and download attached files for additional scanning and processing; or review recent uploads to a file system and download invoices for intake — effectively unifying the capture, extraction, and routing workflows. These types of simple automations can save busy departments hundreds of hours per year in processing time. 

Integrate smarter with Automation Hero

Automation Hero is one of the most comprehensive and versatile enterprise automation platforms on the market, including its integration capabilities. The service currently has 35 pre-built connectors to third-party applications, but the system can guide users to connect with virtually any standard communication interface, like a REST API, no IT support or advanced computer skills needed. 

In addition to the common applications that most enterprises use today, Automation Hero integrates with old legacy software that businesses wish they had upgraded a long time ago. This makes Automation Hero a favored platform for organizations that have been slow to adopt automation because disconnected solutions would involve such a massive overhaul of their processes. The Automation Hero platform can extract data from these old legacy systems so customers can move on to more modern software, or continue to work seamlessly with it. Automation Hero even supports complex security. 

Other automation platforms can struggle to find documents that have been forwarded between departments, often requiring users to manually save and submit documents as time consuming extra steps. But, data can’t hide from Automation Hero. Especially proficient with processing emails, the platform can extract invoices attachments from chains with multiple back-and-forths — without any loss of information or accuracy. Automation Hero can even handle Microsoft Outlook’s notoriously challenging EML file format.

Integrations have proven to be one of the final missing pieces for AP departments to fully automate their processes. However, most invoice capture, extraction, and approval workflow tools are separate from one another, creating an unnecessary layer of complexity and risk of technical errors. While Automation Hero can fold into AP’s existing software solutions and existing processes and fill in gaps where it’s needed, the true purpose of Automation Hero is to serve as a complete, end-to-end enterprise automation platform that’s capable of fully unifying and automating the entire invoice processing workflow. 

Ready to streamline your accounts payable department? Learn how Automation Hero can help in our new eBook.  

Jan 10, 2022 by Automation Hero

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a major time-saving and productivity enhancing tool for organizations of every size. The technology allows users to step away from manual, rules-based business processes and let them be handled by programming scripts. Virtually any task that doesn’t require creativity or complex decision-making can be fully automated. Best of all, RPA can complete workflows in a fraction of the time it takes humans to do it, with less chance of error, and no deviation or burnout.  

Accounts payable departments in particular can benefit from automation. Goldman Sachs estimates that it costs businesses $16 to $22 in labor to process each invoice. When automating these processes, those expenses fall a shocking 60% to 70%, down to as little as $5.89 per invoice. However, even with all the benefits it brings, many AP departments are struggling with their RPA.

Invoice processing automation: the problems with RPA

RPA is limited only to following scripted procedures. It doesn’t have the ability to understand any documents its processing or develop context for any data. As a result, users have to manually build templates for RPA to follow whenever they interact with a document. If any documents that enter a workflow don’t fit that template, the automation will process it incorrectly or even stop working. 

Aside from document templates, scripts must follow a specific set of sequences in order to execute correctly. They can be quite time consuming and expensive to set up, often requiring high-level IT support to implement. Even worse, it can take months of research and testing to get a process to work properly. 

Unfortunately, businesses are changing at a rapid pace, so templates and processes might not be relevant for long. Because of the high upfront costs to implement RPA, workflows may need an update before the user has even seen a return on their investment. To control costs, many AP departments opt for a Band-Aid solution instead of investing in a full overhaul. As this happens more and more over time, RPA can become like an unwieldy Rube Goldberg machine that’s almost as time consuming to manage as invoice processing manually. 

Automate invoices smarter with intelligent document processing

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is a type of automation solution that can capture, extract, and organize data from almost any kind of source, including physically printed text and images, PDFs, emails, submitted forms, and even handwritten notes. This has been an incredible boon for AP departments, and when paired with a properly functioning RPA, it can improve productivity even more. Some of the benefits include:

Greater Labor Efficiency

IDP systems use optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from documents and then process it into usable data. This makes the capture stage of invoice processing much faster so AP professionals can get through the review process in a fraction of the time of a manual workflow.

Reduced Human Error 

Minimizing human touch points also reduces the risk of human error. It can be easy to misread numbers, make typos, or misunderstand invoices — especially during busy, high-volume seasons for AP departments. IDP removes a lot of the manual labor that goes into processing invoices so users can focus more on critical decisions during review. 

More Cost-Effective Processes

IDP extracts and processes data quicker than humanly possible, without getting tired or needing a break to maintain focus. When you remove tasks that can cause or give opportunity for workers to procrastinate or lose focus, everything goes quicker — including how soon an invoice is paid out. Greater efficiency translates to greater profits, since cost of labor goes down and invoices can be processed on time without incurring late fees. 

Next-gen invoice processing automation with modern AI

Automation Hero is a new kind of automation platform that builds upon the best aspects of IDP and RPA in order to take them to a higher level. Powered by deep learning AI, the platform breaks free of templates and is able to contextualize any kind of data for faster processing. Automation Hero is versatile enough to add on to your existing system and improve its performance, or serve as a completely standalone, end-to-end invoice automation solution to managing all of your invoice processing.

Learn more about how Automation Hero can streamline your accounts payable department in our new eBook covering invoice processing automation.  

Get tips from Automation Hero CEO Stefan Groschupf from the Claims Innovation conference.

Jul 20, 2021 by Automation Hero

For teams inside traditional insurance companies, it hasn’t been an easy few years. The cost of processing claims is rising, while traditional sources of income, like interest from bonds and other investments, are dropping. Not to mention there’s a new crop of digital-first challengers in insurance — companies like Lemonade and Kin — who tout, among other things, exceptionally fast customer service.

All of this sets up insurers to need a range of new technological solutions, says Stefan Groschupf, CEO and founder of Automation Hero, who spoke in a fireside chat last week at the Claims Innovation virtual online conference. 

So how can traditional insurers take a more tech-savvy approach? What’s required is a shift in mindset and also a culture shift inside companies, Groschupf said. In a risk-averse industry like insurance, the best way for teams to ease into using new technology like automation and AI is to take small steps toward change and then iteratively learn and improve.

What’s the potential upside for insurers and claims teams who take the technological leap? The benefits are numerous:  

• better customer experience 
• lower operational costs
• better fraud detection
• better operational insights into claims
• lower claim processing time 
• better employee satisfaction

Check out our insurance use cases here. 

Watch Stefan’s full Claims Innovation talk below. 

Medken and Automation Hero kick off partnership to improve health outcomes and cut costs in the $3 trillion healthcare industry

Jun 04, 2021 by Automation Hero

In a digital era, what’s the hallmark of good healthcare? If you guessed it has something to do with technology, you’d be right. 

A heap of new studies show that healthcare practitioners make better decisions when they use advanced technologies such as machine learning. New algorithms can help doctors with everything from improving clinical trials for new drugs to detecting heart disease and lung cancer. 

But what’s equally important for good health outcomes is how doctors and clinics handle all sorts of patient-related data. 

When doctors have a more complete picture of a patient’s medical history — including their risk factors for certain kinds of diseases — they tend to make better decisions about that patient’s care. But huge volumes of patient medical information stay locked away inside paper documents and files, stuffed into cabinets inside medical clinics. Even when the information is digitized, there are still plenty of problems with how it’s used, transmitted and handed off between health organizations, especially in the United States, according to a recent study by Pew Charitable Trusts. 

Speeding up digital transformation

So what’s the solution? Automation Hero is teaming up with medical software maker Medken to help streamline data handling and speed up digital transformation for healthcare providers. 

Medken, a Texas-based software company, leads the transformation of industrial medicine into human-centered, evidence-based medicine by providing a platform, tools and components for software developers. This allows them to launch human-centered workflow solutions within a short amount of time. Automation Hero has unparalleled capabilities around converting unstructured data and paper documents into usable, structured information. Together, the two companies have created an automation solution that will help providers improve outcomes and cut costs across the board.

Privacy matters

One aspect of the partnership that’s critical to both companies: privacy. Citizens in every country have been concerned in recent years about protecting the privacy of their health data, with many hesitant to share data or be honest with their doctors (omitting family history, past ailments, habits, etc.) so that the details do not go into their data record. Industry watchers have noted that data security is actually one of healthcare’s biggest concerns. This makes it difficult for doctors to diagnose and treat illnesses and in fact contributes to a general information breakdown. If patients can’t openly share because they fear the data will be mistreated, what are they supposed to do?

In a world of data exploitation, giving people full control over their health data is a matter of dignity. Medken and Automation Hero are committed to data protection above and beyond the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States. To that end, Medken is a sponsor of an open-source personal electronic health record project by Kailona and brings that expertise to the collaboration.

What’s at stake

Why should healthcare companies care about streamlining processes and optimizing data handling? Digital health initiatives not only lead to better healthcare outcomes but also give wider access to care for patients from different geographies and demographics. In addition, they can save healthcare companies billions of dollars in revenue. A recent report from the nonprofit Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare showed that healthcare companies could save $16.3 billion if they streamlined manual work through automation. In the end, privacy-focused digital transformation in medicine means better results for everyone.

To learn more, get in touch.

Before and after doctor visits, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence and machine learning can save overworked humans hours of valuable time.

May 10, 2021 by Jess McCuan

Few industries are in more desperate need of a technology overhaul than healthcare. In a scathing post on the American Medical Association site last year, Dr. James Madara, the AMA president, wrote that if a year of dealing with COVID-19 proved anything, it’s that the US healthcare system (both before and after the pandemic) is “a hodgepodge of ideas, programs and regulations that is both extraordinarily expensive and highly inefficient.” His recommendations for fixing the situation include eliminating needless paperwork and boosting human intelligence with technology — training physicians to use technology from the 21st century, not the 20th.

So what’s the first step in taming healthcare bureaucracy? In fact, one of the easiest ways to help healthcare practitioners is to combine human skill with augmented intelligence to eliminate all the nonclinical manual tasks associated with their jobs. 

Automate appointment scheduling

Take appointment scheduling, for example. The American Association of Family Physicians found that a sizable chunk of healthcare inefficiencies, which cost hospital systems billions each year, include scheduling and missed appointments. The AAFP noted that up to 30 percent of appointments resulted in no-shows, a phenomenon that another study found costs American companies $150 billion annually. 

Artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence can help streamline every aspect of appointment scheduling from end to end. For example, let’s say a patient sends an email to a clinic, hoping to set up an appointment in the coming weeks. That email would normally need to be read by a human, a process that could take up to 5 minutes. But Automation Hero’s platform can detect the intent of that incoming message, automate the scheduling of an appointment based on it, and perform appropriate next steps. (It can also do this for other common requests, which helps eliminate human error in these low-level processes).

Communicate with patients — about the important things

It can help with other aspects of patient communication too. Let’s say a patient is puzzled about some aspect of a monthly bill. He or she emails the healthcare provider with several questions and includes attached documents. If the healthcare group is using Automation Hero, it can instantly use an artificial intelligence model to detect the email’s basic content and intent, then route the email automatically to the appropriate department. It also uses natural language processing and machine learning to extract relevant information from the attached documents, the same way a human might. The info might include patient or medical record numbers, visit dates, and other details. Extracting this automatically combines human capabilities with machine intelligence and saves administrative staff valuable time for higher-value tasks. It also gives IT staff actionable insights based on real-time practice data.

Has your lab testing facility seen an uptick in volume due to COVID-19? Augmented intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing can help with all the nonclinical functions, from processing identification documents during patient intake to interpreting handwritten forms to scheduling appointments,  processing invoices, and delivering lab results. This means human staffers can get back to what they do best, which is interacting with patients and weighing in on higher-level decisions that involve strategy or judgment.

Humans + machines = happier outcomes

To be sure, healthcare’s problems run deep, including plenty of problems data scientists can’t fix. But long before and after a patient sees a doctor, there are plenty of tasks that augmented intelligence and machine learning can streamline, giving actionable insights to administrative staff and giving the healthcare industry’s overworked humans precious hours of their time back. 

How better UI helps break barriers to AI.

Mar 17, 2021 by Automation Hero

Access to automation takes a big leap forward with Automation Hero’s new Flow Studio. 

After months of hard work, we’re thrilled to announce a slew of new features in the Hero platform: a redesigned Flow Studio and the exciting new Library. The new features not only take usability to another level, but also let people easily create by curation, copying and pasting powerful automations from an existing set within our platform.

Why it matters 

Tech giants have built their companies around AI and automation, meaning the Amazons and Microsofts of the world are now far outpacing their competitors. But when automation is only available to goliaths with armies of developers, competition gets stifled across the board. It leaves small and medium-sized companies out of the game.

Because we’re shifting into a more visual mode for automating business processes, your company no longer needs to hire teams of developers or data scientists.

Automation happens via graphical user interface with a few clicks and reusable components. When you want to automate a business process, you simply drag and drop elements from an element browser. You can also pull an example automation from the Library the same way you might from a recipe book, rather than starting from scratch.

What’s new

In the new Flow Studio, it’s easier to collaborate. With a more visual and user-friendly interface, everyone from an operations manager to an administrative assistant can see clearly how to run and build automations. You can also now annotate your work — creating a headline, strategy note, or any other type of note for your teammates to explain your thinking. This makes automations easier to share across an organization. 

In the new Library, you’ll find hundreds of examples of automations that companies have already built — which you can then copy, paste, or modify. This removes any intimidation factor from building automations. Wondering how to quickly analyze a heap of emails in a company inbox? You can get inspired by reviewing how another company tackled the problem before.   

Looking into the post-pandemic future 

Intelligent automation is the key to thriving in a post-Covid economy. This means streamlining workflows, cutting manual tasks, and adapting to permanently remote work setups. Companies that recognize this and can use automation well will race ahead of their competition. Breaking down barriers to using automation tools gives all companies (not just tech giants) new powers to excel. 

Want to try out the new Flow Studio? Click here. 

The pandemic has a ripple effect on everything from the cloud to cybersecurity.

Dec 11, 2020 by Stefan Groschupf

What’s ahead for the tech world in 2021? Global research and advisory firm Gartner looked into its crystal ball to identify top trends, many of which reflect the fact that the ongoing pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we live and work. Distributed cloud, distributed cybersecurity architecture, and location-independent operations, along with robust AI engineering, all get big play in the firm’s list — anticipating that we’re all going to be working from our couches a bit longer.

While some of these trends, like hyperautomation, are not new and were mentioned in Gartner’s previous tech predictions (see our take on hyperautomation done right), plenty of what’s new on the 2021 list seems spot on.  

We wanted to see how future-proof our platform is in light of where Gartner believes the world is headed. Here’s how we stack up against their 9 trends.

Trend 1: the Internet of Behaviors

This was up for discussion way back in 2014, but it’s increasingly relevant as technology becomes deeply ingrained in our everyday habits. Essentially, this means using data to influence behavior through feedback loops.

While Gartner focuses on personal safety (installing sensors or RFID tags to tell whether employees have washed their hands), the IoB plays out in hundreds of ways in the broader business world. 

How we stack up: Beyond physical actions, IoB comes up in the form of decision-making. Does an invoice usually sit in Bill’s queue for three days before it gets sent to Stacy and then the manager, Sheryl? 

With employees permanently remote, it’s more important than ever to map your company’s core business processes end to end — whether that’s account signups, invoice processing or some other critical function. Process mining, never a glamorous pursuit, will now be a bigger driver of business strategy as companies chart out how employees get work done, and how to optimize each step.

Automation Hero’s Hero_Sonar stands apart from other process mining tools in that it can analyze and understand behavior, including the most complex business processes. We simply need the “who,” “what,” and “when” — and based on this we can visualize behavior around any kind of process. Then we turn that into an AI model that optimizes future processes. Robin, our automation assistant, brings humans into the loop for feedback.

Our process mining tool, Hero_Sonar, can visualize behavior around any kind of business process.

Trend 2: Total experience

This is customer experience writ large, a signal from Gartner that indicates customer experience is now so important that everything from employee experience to user experience gets wrapped into it. 

How we stack up: One of the best ways to fully understand and reshape a customer experience is to map it out (as suggested above) using Hero_Sonar. The process mapping tool lets you see and then automate, for example, all steps in an engagement journey. This can result in faster response times for customers or your employees having a better grasp of how they might improve the customer experience. On the employee experience front, Automation Hero can automate employees’ most mind-numbing repetitive tasks, which ultimately improves their work experience.

Trend 3: Privacy-enhancing computation

According to Gartner, this trend involves three technologies that protect data: 

1. a trusted environment in which sensitive data can be processed or analyzed
2. a way to do processing and analytics in a decentralized manner
3. a way to encrypt data and algorithms before processing or analytics

How we stack up: When more employees work from home, personal and sensitive data must by necessity leave the company’s controlled, secured networks. But here’s where automation comes in. As more data can be processed “dark” (without humans), the more secure that data becomes. And as more data decisions are automated with AI (think of insurance claims of a routine nature or low dollar amount) this means less data leaves the company network and lowers the risk of information winding up in the wrong hands. 

Trend 4: Distributed cloud

This means cloud services exist in different physical locations, but operation and governance responsibilities remain with the public cloud provider.

How we stack up: Automation Hero is built for distributed cloud and is arguably the first platform that truly supports it. Specifically, our platform is built in a way that it can run in a distributed cluster made from servers that live in different cloud environments, e.g. with three servers in AWS, three in Google Cloud, three in MSFT Azure, three in a private cloud, etc. This increases reliability, as the system will still run if one of the clouds goes down.

Trend 5: Anywhere operations

It’s another trend that’s been building steam for years but is now boiling hot because of the pandemic. As Gartner notes, “an anywhere operations model will be vital for businesses to emerge successfully from COVID-19.”

How we stack up: Automation Hero is designed specifically for anywhere operations, mainly because we can make even legacy systems like mainframes digital-first. Let’s say a batch of unstructured data sits in a system in one part of the company, and you need to merge it with structured data in another system. Our connectors can pull together all those data sources to inform intelligent action, with the platform acting as something of a nervous system. 

Trend 6: Cybersecurity mesh

This is a particularly thorny problem, as companies have seen a dramatic uptick in cyber attacks, even on cybersecurity companies themselves. It’s even trickier with more people working from home, as hackers can take advantage of the weaker security of home networks. 

How we stack up: Plenty of companies specialize in cybersecurity. We do not. Our platform is highly secure, protects personally identifiable information (PII) and has robust authentication, authorization and encryption capabilities. Automation and AI can also be useful for pulling together different security environments.

Trend 7: Intelligent composable business

According to Gartner, this means a company can adapt quickly to its current situation, ultimately “increasing autonomy and democratization across the organization, enabling parts of the businesses to quickly react instead of being bogged down by inefficient processes.”

How we stack up: This concept is core to the Automation Hero platform. We let companies build self-contained automations to solve a specific business problem — let’s say that’s customer onboarding, or charging a customer. You can then run these automations as microservices, building them via point and click. These “automation services” then work together as a new business process or even a whole new business offering. 

We also enable parts of any business to react quickly by providing point-and-click capabilities around things like AI models and connectors. This appeals to less technical users, and increases autonomy and democratization across the organization through a platform that’s centrally managed by IT but accessible for everyone else. 

Trend 8: AI engineering

Investments in artificial intelligence have been big for years, but now Gartner believes “AI engineering” — in other words, making AI scalable and sustainable for the long haul — will be more important in the years ahead. 

How we stack up: Making AI accessible and real for more people inside a company is another core tenant at Automation Hero. Our platform offers point-and-click AI capabilities for both data scientists and citizen data scientists, which means you don’t have to have an army of data scientists on staff to successfully use AI. We can operationalize new or existing AI models at massive scale, which means AI becomes more distributed, fail-tolerant, and secure.

Trend 9: Hyperautomation

Gartner’s definition of this term has evolved slightly, and now means: “anything that can be automated in an organization should be automated.” It also gets new context around legacy businesses. In short, any company with outdated processes that are not “lean, optimized, connected, clean or explicit,” will be left behind by faster-moving, digital-native companies. 

How we stack up:  When this buzzy new term took off in early 2020, we argued that smart automation for enterprise companies is hyperautomation. Companies that use traditional RPA vendors to speed up processes here and there end up with a stack of internal systems duct taped together, with simplistic automations running on top of legacy software. 

This has the indirect effect of cementing the legacy software in place. Instead of automating in this piecemeal way, enterprise companies should take a step back to see the bigger picture, automating not just for temporary productivity boosts but also in a way that leads to fully autonomous processes that fuel long-term business goals. 

Automation Hero is arguably the first true end-to-end platform built for hyperautomation, since it is an agile, iterative platform that can incorporate new information and workflows. It goes beyond RPA, natively integrating AI and other tools that Gartner highlights, including intelligent business management software (iBPMS), process mining, analytics and decision modeling.