As of 2024, 60% of businesses have automated at least one business process, and 80% of organizations are accelerating the speed of business automation. While different reports can put forth different statistics, the running theme in all of them is that business automation solutions are helping businesses across domains optimize operational efficiency, lower operational costs, and drive long-term sustainable business growth.
The evolution in business process automation has been extremely rapid, with software-based automation giving way to cloud or SaaS-based automation to finally AI-based automation and hyper automation today, with Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT), ensuring fragmented tools, technologies processes, and systems all come together and work in unison to ensure streamlined operations and getting rid of silos, to bring the next level of automation efficiency across operational frameworks.
This article aims to take on the trends shaping business process and automation technologies, giving readers a ringside, actionable view of the way the business automation industry is shaping up. The idea is to help businesses take decisive steps in their automation journey.
Trend 1: Agentic AI in Business Automation
Enterprises are welcoming agentic AI, digital workers trained to handle tasks such as managing routine customer inquiries, drafting initial code, scanning codebases, prioritizing bugs, and more. By automating process-level actions, these AI agents link your IT infrastructure and business applications to deliver tangible value.
With AI agents managing data analysis, tactical pivots, and recurring issues, teams can devote their time to strategic decision-making. These agents dig into data to identify high-value insights, enabling faster adjustments in customer engagement, service delivery, or operational efficiency.
According to McKinsey, 92% of companies plan to increase AI investments over the next three years. As AI maturity grows, workflows and operating models will evolve: agentic AI can surface the right information at the right time, accelerate decision cycles, and support long-term planning across global teams through AI-driven automation.
Trend 2: Focused Reduction in Automation Silos
While automation is being eagerly adopted by businesses across domains, for many, this automation exists in silos, and the ensuing compartmentalization of automation has a detrimental impact on the ROI, resulting in technical debt. This is where Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT) offer a strategic approach to remove these automation silos. BOAT is essentially a management framework that seeks to unify the gamut of automation architecture, that consolidates business automation technologies, RPA , data analytics and intelligence, and AI. This consolidation is configured to manage workflow complexity, wherein businesses no longer have to manage and optimize multiple disparate systems.
Trend 3: Hyperautomation
There are diverse technologies available for automation, including AI for business automation, machine learning, robotic process automation, and more, and it is the seamless integration of these technologies that enhances business process automation, which helps optimizes people, process, and platform. Think of hyperautomation as an all-encompassing strategy that seeks to achieve enterprise-wide automation, which includes three critical stages: a) discovery, b) automation, and c) orchestration. We talked about BOAT earlier, and how it breaks down an organization’s automation siloes, and this value add is what makes BOAT a critical component of an organization’s hyperautomation goals.
Trend 4: Predictive Process Intelligence with Generative AI Integration
Processes need to be optimized continuously, which can only happen through continuous monitoring, coupled with action taken on the intelligence received.
Process mining helps organizations monitor system behavior by collecting live data, but this data must be analyzed to gain actionable insights from it, and while there are traditional tools that help you do this, the addition of generative AI to this mix can help identify normal patterns by quickly analyzing data in real time, which in turn helps flag abnormal patterns proactively. At the same time, generative AI can suggest ways of improving the process model, and/or suggest a better way of doing things, by plugging the gaps in the older model.
Imagine a hotel chain that needs to overhaul its booking system. This system is rigid, the CX is laborious, and post booking, there is very little context when it comes to the hotel and its guests. Enter a combination of process mining that conducts a drill-down review of the process, and generative AI that makes outcomes-focused suggestions, such as leveraging CPaaS as a way of improving the booking processes and enhancing customer interactions.
Trend 5: The March Towards Industry 5.0 Continues
The pinnacle of Industry 4.0, or the fourth industrial revolution, was truly autonomous factories. We’ve all seen images of factories in China and Europe where technologies like IoT, Big Data, RPA, BPM that earlier existed in silos, working together to perform in unison to make workflows autonomous, rather than just automated. This process is being fine-tuned as we speak, and over the years we are going to see many more factories like the Shanghai Gigafactory, which boasts 95% automation.
But what next? What is the next frontier in manufacturing and the use of AI for business automation? The answer is adding the human touch to digitalized processes. As the manufacturing world marches towards Industry 5.0, we are talking, efficiency, productivity, and humans playing a bigger role in the production process; we are talking about sustainable human interaction with machine workers and automated systems, so that different departments across the shopfloor work better together, come closer to their customers (understand customers better), leverage the benefits of an autonomous working environment, and together bring more value to the table.
To put it simply, Industry 5.0 is Industry 4.0 + more human centricity. Human-machine collaboration is the way ahead.
Trend 6: Cloud Native Automation
The automation race will in large part be given a fillip by cloud native automation platform. We are looking at a single platform that delivers a range of capabilities and deployment options, including robotic process automation, cloud RPA and more.
The objective is to help businesses scale quickly, leveraging automation, e.g., deploy a digital workforce across different business locations across different geographies, and leverage automation on demand.
Think of these platforms as the nerve center of automation, helping businesses monitor all automated resources from a single pane of glass and uncover all the available automation opportunities. From here, they can integrate a variety of tools and technologies to further optimize workflows. The core purpose of these platforms is to enable seamless deployment and orchestration of complex automation across business processes.
Trend 7- Self-Service Automation
The process of setting up an automation workflow needs to be democratized. This must happen because business users are one of the key stakeholders when it comes to business processes or instances within these processes that need to be automated.
Organizations can custom-configure cloud native automation platform into a centralized automation platform that can be accessed by different departments, automate tasks deemed fit for automation.
Imagine creating an IT self-service portal that helps troubleshoot repetitive issues, or even password reset, or HR leveraging self-service automation to streamline certain HR processes that do not require human intervention.
Trend 8 – Automation as a Service
Business automation consultants are in great demand, but so is automation-as-a-service (AaaS).
There are two elements to AaaS.
The first element or model is internal, wherein the IT ops team in an organization delivers safe, secure, managed, and scalable automation capabilities to stakeholders across the business. This means users send an automation request to IT ops, who then proceed to address this request within established guardrails and ensure compliance.
The second element or model is external, where automation is delivered as a service by third-party providers. In this setup, businesses don’t build or manage their in-house automation platforms. Instead, they rely on Automation-as-a-Service (AaaS) providers to design, develop, deploy, and manage the entire automation framework based on their needs. It’s an on-demand, need-based approach that provides companies with access to powerful automation without the overhead of maintaining their infrastructure.
The Road Towards a Smarter Operational Model with Automation
Whether your business has a business automation strategy in place, or has taken nascent steps towards automating certain business processes, you need an actionable roadmap to make a success of it.
Here’s a roadmap playbook that can take you over the green line when it comes to automation ROI:
1. Begin with Processes that Hurt the Most
You will have high friction processes that result in customer churn, high operational costs, and lost profitability. Zero in on these processes, and flag them for automation. This is a process of evaluation and discovery, that helps you invest in areas that will deliver the maximum positive impact for your business.
2. Map Workflows Before Automation
This is not up for debate. What ails the current process? This is the question you must answer, and that can only happen when you talk to people who are managing this process, who can then help pinpoint the weaknesses in the processes, and how they think the platform must be automated to deliver clear measurable value. By mapping gaps, grey areas, you can create and execute a plan of action that doesn’t miss critical areas.
3. A Consolidated Approach
A technology sprawl is never a good idea. An experienced business automation consultant will advise you to stay away from a disparate automation stack and focus on platforms and solutions that bring together process management, workflow automation, native integration, and low code that is configured to minimize technical debt, and can scale to meet the growing demands of a business.
4. Don’t Forget the Humans
Humans, your business users are your core team, and they must be made an integral part of your automation strategy. Think about implementing self-service automation with guardrails and IT oversight to help them build and iterate on automation quickly. The organization’s focus should be on enabling stakeholders to make and execute key automation decisions that ensures continuous automation improvement.
To Conclude
Businesses that don’t see automation as a ‘can do’ but ‘must do’ items will reap rich rewards. If you want to experience growth, automation is a key growth driver. We have discussed eight shifts in business automation that are going define businesses automation, and many of these shifts are either interconnected or overlap, whether it is BOAT and Hyperautomation or Self-Service Automation and Automation-as-a-Service. It is up to an organization to run with a trend that they feel fits their existing IT and process framework to the T.
Your next step should be to think in terms of consolidating and orchestrating your automation strategy with BOAT, have clear measurable goals in terms of automation ROI, and ensure robust machine and people collaboration.
