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e are entering a new era of human-machine interface for repetitive and rote processes. More than ever, software tools are emerging as the '€œrobots'€ for knowledge work and driving real impact. These enterprise robots may not resemble the automatons from your favorite sci-fi movie. However, a recent Cognizant study shows that when applied to automating core business processes, they can extend the productivity and problem-solving capabilities of human beings and improve business results.

Cognizant'€™s research finds that humans are working smarter with sophisticated software to automate business tasks, generating rich process data that can drive meaningful insights, value and outcomes for businesses. It is increasingly clear that robots do not dominate the process automation space, but rather help to make smart humans smarter and businesses more agile. Intelligent automation is about improving what people can do. The meaning contained in process data yielded by automation can be unlocked using process analytics. Some organizations are automating work through digitization.

They are re-imagining and instrumenting processes from their inception so as to fully harness the power of emerging technologies, such as social, mobile, analytics, cloud and more recently the Internet of Things (IoT), where sensors are beginning to digitize and automate processes in a straight-through data flow.

Humans performing knowledge work are complemented by technology in increasingly high-value ways. Humans are attaining new levels of process efficiency at reduced cost. People are still essential to process work in banking, healthcare, life sciences and insurance. So smart businesses are using intelligent automation to also empower people.

Saving money and driving greater impact from process optimization has been the key driver of automation technologies since the dawn of computing. With robots, intelligent automation has come to signify the next wave of efficiency gain in business processes. Many organizations are starting to use robots to do rote tasks less expensively, while leveraging people for more complex processes by allowing them to apply their talents and creativity in ways that robots cannot.

According to the survey, while 26 percent of banking respondents have realized more than 15 percent cost savings from automation in their front office and customer-facing functions within one year, 55 percent expect those same levels of savings within three to five years.

It is a similar story in just about every vertical and horizontal process domain. Freeing up money by efficiency improvements and investing that money into innovation is key to sustainable future growth. That explains why half of the respondents see automation '€” and 44 percent see analytics '€” as delivering a positive impact to processes in three to five years.

Yet, the real prize of process automation is in the explosion of rich process-level data. Analytics can help make meaning of this data and extract insights from it, which can then help organizations improve performance and innovate for the needs of tomorrow.

In logistics, this can take the form of real-time dynamic fleet optimization for destination and delivery capacity. In the pharmaceutical world, this can help collate huge volumes of clinical data for optimized trials. Using analytics in customer-facing processes is helping boost revenues and this trend will continue to grow across most customer-facing work.

Smart robots, apart from saving money by automating processes, also improve accuracy and reliability with zero variance and significantly fewer errors. But robots still need oversight to monitor, orchestrate, coordinate and remediate problems.

Automation thus has its limits '€” there are some things that robots just can'€™t do, such as medical management, underwriting, case reviews and speak or comprehend colloquial expressions. The domain skills of subject matter experts too will continue to exist outside the realm of what we can expect from robots, at least in the short term. That'€™s where a blended model of automation involving robots, analytics and humans working in tandem can provide optimal outcomes.

For example, intelligent process automation made it possible for a healthcare payer to detect double-billing. By consolidating a distributed process, a single robot can flag patterns that multiple human agents couldn'€™t notice because they see only a subset of claims. Automating the provider verification processes using automation also eliminated the time-consuming copy-and-paste data collection from multiple websites, so humans could focus on spotting anomalies and fraudulent activity and manage exceptions.

It'€™s like a person who chooses to take a car because it'€™s faster than walking. Intelligent automation working with smart people drives better and faster outcomes for clients, job satisfaction for employees, their customers and the bottom line.

Digitizing one or several pieces of an industry process value chain can impact the health of the whole business. It is important for organizations to define pressure points and then identify where, how and when smart technologies such as automation can complement the workforce, and make smart people smarter. Organizations that can master smart robots tethered to smart data will outpace rivals who don'€™t '€” or can'€™t.
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The writer is the chief operating officer of emerging business accelerator, Cognizant. The views expressed are his own.