Ultimately, it’s not going to be about man versus machine. It is going to be about man with machines.
Satya Nadella
The business world is facing a new wave of innovation where emerging technologies are unlocking myriad opportunities and transforming various aspects of the business. Businesses of tomorrow will see their workforce transformed by developments such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Business Process Automation (BPA) and Chatbots to deliver a competitive advantage and ensure best possible business outcomes.
Quintillion bytes of data are produced each day and the number is increasing at a staggering pace as we speak. The ability to make sense from the avalanche of business data will decide the winners from losers in the years ahead. When mined and nurtured with intelligence, data can unlock new possibilities and make way for “data driven” organization culture. Therefore, the first block in the puzzle is to ensure that the data is collected, analyzed and streamlined in a way to help your organization make informed and confident business decisions by putting data-driven insights to the fore.
However, recent research indicates that although organizations understand the benefits of adopting a “data-driven” culture, yet they are struggling to get such initiatives off the ground. Key challenges for them remain around hiring the right team of data experts and mitigating the organizational silos around business data. Democratization of data enables organizations to navigate past such challenges and allows employees to interact and utilize data as and when they need it.
Democratization of data empowers the business users to tap directly into unprecedented amounts of data and quickly get reports, dashboards and visualizations. Although, the users might still struggle garner the specific results needed to make better decisions. Further still, Business Intelligence systems produce so much analysis and raw data that it’s difficult to segregate insights that will create an actual business impact. Additionally, democratization also creates problems regarding the security of confidential business data. All such challenges can be mitigated with Intelligent Automation.
As you might already know, Intelligent Automation is the latest buzzword in the business circles. It is the unification of two popular technological concepts: AI (which includes natural language processing and machine learning) and automation. This concept is already changing the way business is done across all industries and helping organizations transcend conventional performance tradeoffs to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency and quality.
Intelligent Automation allows organizations to synthesize data and automate entire processes or workflows, learning and adapting as they go. Intelligent automation systems can range from routine to the revolutionary applications: from collecting, analyzing, and making decisions about data to engaging conversationally with advanced Chatbots.
Here are few ways to achieve Intelligent Automation:
Recognizing the far-fetched business advantages of Business Intelligence (BI), most organizations already have a well-established data gathering and analysis process in place. However, data-driven insights are not readily or easily available to the employees dispersed across locations and departments. This impacts employee productivity, business continuity and decision outcomes. These challenges can be easily mitigated by developing easy to use applications and impactful dashboards. Such organizational solutions would bring key business insights at the fingertips of employees and help them take decisions with a higher accuracy.
There are many low-code application platforms (LCAP) which enables organizations to rapidly and easily develop applications for intelligent automation. The joy of such platforms is that users can create an application with least coding knowledge. Some of the leading LCAP platforms include AgilePoint, Appian, Betty Blocks, among others. However, the recent Gartner report puts Microsoft’s Power Platform in the leader category for LCAP.
AI powered conversational Chatbots allow organizations to take their intelligent automation initiatives to the next level. It can initiate human-like conversation to solve common internal and customer-facing problems. And through these interactions, the Bots are able to provide valuable insights to the organization. When connected with the core BI system, the Chatbot interactions can offer many unknown insights.
It is no wonder than that Chatbots are a rage among the modern-day organizations. Facebook’s Bot for Messenger, Botsify, ChattyPeople, Beep Boop are popular Chatbot building platforms available. And Microsoft Azure Bot Service which helps develop intelligent, enterprise-grade bots that help you enrich the customer experience while maintaining control over your data. Build any type of bot—from a Q&A bot to your own branded virtual assistant— and quickly connect your users to the answers they need.
Given the importance of data in this digital era, it is critical for organizations to have a single powerful platform that would help in unleashing the huge potential of data across the entire organization. Data-driven organizations need to adopt a cyclical approach that includes business processes, to Analyze, Automate, Act, and Iterate.
Microsoft Power Platform solves this problem by providing an enterprise-grade platform to empower any organization — even those that typically use multiple disparate tools. It is an integrated application that combines Power BI, PowerApps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. These tools cover four critical areas in today’s business landscape:
As a Microsoft certified Power Platform partner, we can help you with assessment, planning, customization, deployment and support for all the Power Platform workloads. Contact us for any query or service request.
