In 2020, the global pandemic forced global organizations to accelerate digital transformation across sectors. With the transition to 2021, remote work and virtual business transactions are destined to remain.
Considering digital transformation as an engine of competitiveness, companies have staked everything on the advancements of automation and artificial intelligence to re-imagine organizational workflows.
Here are the 7 main trends we will see over the course of 2021:
New Agile Tools to Communicate and Work Remotely
Programs such as Zoom and MS Teams with all their automations, have dominated 2020 as a solution for working remotely and will dominate the digital landscape of collaboration and video chat tools, even after the pandemic.
Companies that do not use these new communication tools will be stuck in the past and will be further and further behind.
The next step for RPA (Automation of Robotic Processes)
Automations such as monotonous data entry and “cut and paste” have now become commonplace, turning them from tedious to quick and easy operations. In 2021, the experience learned on process automation will be leveraged more and better integrated within companies to make up for those monotonous routine jobs, creating lighter and more valuable workflows.
Prioritize Workflows
Activities such as onboarding, invoice processing or document approval are important pieces of a company’s DNA. These activities can be automated making them faster, easier and cheaper.
The following workflows will be used:
- Document intelligence: Cognitive acquisition and artificial intelligence on unstructured data to automate and extract information and unlock insights.
- Process Orchestration: Orchestrate digital workflows in collaboration with users, systems and data.
- Connected systems: connection of various critical business systems, such as business applications, legacy systems, mobile devices, chatbots through internal and external business processes.
Ecosystems
Customized platforms formed by vast networks of technologies, applications and services that operate simultaneously within their architectures. These ecosystems will increasingly be required by companies in 2021 to achieve the business results they desire, accelerating their ability to achieve the desired automation results.
More and More Citizen Developer
With the emergence of more intuitive intelligent automation platforms, line-of-business leaders, in partnership with IT, will have the power to focus automation efforts to deliver specific strategic business results. Citizen developers are growing more and more within society by building business apps in the workplace using tools including fourth generation (4GL) languages, low-code technology platforms and cloud services. These “city developers” will leverage intelligent automation to transform information-intensive business workflows. Many companies that excel in the New Normal today are already following this approach, creating agility, reducing technical debt and accelerating time-to-value.
The Data Deriving From 5G
5G will allow companies to transmit, collect and analyze huge amounts of data, and the organizations that manage to absorb it will be able to navigate the wave of 5G data and reach new levels of performance. Artificial intelligence and cognitive acquisition will be key to achieving document / data classification, sentiment analysis, and extracting content from key documents such as financial records.
More Accessible Artificial Intelligence
AI in 2021 will be unraveled throughout the company. Technologies such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Intelligent Optical Character Recognition and Image Recognition will be easy to integrate and will be used more and more by “citizen developers” to integrate with automation platforms, transforming the company’s digital workflow , dramatically increasing productivity levels and accelerating work across the global enterprise. Smart automations will enable companies in 2021 to be more efficient by transferring tedious and repetitive work routines to automations and allow employees to focus on higher value jobs.