AI – Automation Intelligence: It’s life, but not as we know it!
Mr Spock from Star Trek is associated with the saying that represents a change in understanding.
By moving past the academic debates about “Artificial” intelligence it is apparent that the real benefit is “Automation Intelligence”.
As humans we want things done for us. To make our lives easier, being able to achieve more and not spend time doing things that are not interesting for us.
Business the “Interesting” bit
Customers are only really interested in business outcomes. They want the results.
When founders create a business, they are usually good at one aspect. It is the part that most interests them. Often doing the business admin and “Running” a business is not the part that excites the founders.
Many management consultants advise “Do what you enjoy and outsource the rest”. It leads to phrases such as “Never worked a day” as spent the time doing enjoyable activities
Automation Intelligence is about enabling people and businesses to perform the bits that are interesting and ensuring the other aspects to deliver the outcomes are achieve through automation.
Competitors Demand Automation
Unless the business is the hand-made, artisan service, then there will be competitors.
Yes, Intellectual Property can provide a differentiator but if there is customer demand, competitors will find an alternative way of offering the customers an equivalent outcome.
For each process within the business that supports the customer from order to outcome, there is either the opportunity to automate or it is a true differentiator.
If a competitor could deliver the same process, then the activity should be automated. Such automation will deliver the consistency and speed of processing which a customer would expect.
Factory floor, warehouse, logistics and office
The logic for automation is often driven by volume of activity. However, the costs to implement automation have been reduced significantly in recent years. It is no longer necessary to think of massive car production lines when considering automation.
Automation driven by e-commerce has dramatically changed warehouse operations and logistics.
Automation of office activity is possible using Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The early adopters already operate the routine activities without people being involved. These leading businesses can focus on exceptions, the unusual and adding “Personal” interactions with customers.
Speaking with a human
Interacting with a business used to mean visiting the shop / office and speaking with a person.
The success of call centres in terms of the cost / benefit for a business has changed in-person conversations to telephone conversations. The dialogue remained real.
The rise of chatbots that deliver text based message interactions have again seen changes in the cost / benefit for businesses. Implementation models where one business person is actively handling / monitoring many chatbot conversations. It has largely changed spoken dialogue into typed text messages.
As AI tools have improved, there is a growing use of speech being transformed into text to interact with the chatbots, as well as chatbots being created as video image of a person so that text responses can also be deliver as audio. The conversation appears to take place in a video call. The conversation still occurs but is it artificial?
Automation as Security Saviour or Nightmare?
With systems becoming more complex, the activity by cyber criminals has increased. Automation with the use of AI and RPA has been identified by some as an important element in the fight against crime.
It is clearly the case that taking people out from the operation of some business processes avoids the risk of a human failure resulting in a crime.
Conversely, the automation does not have any human sense and therefore may be exploited by sophisticated criminals to commit crime at scale.
The CIA – Central Intelligence Agency, is believed to have vast computing resources that enable automation of its monitoring activities at scale. The monitoring might be artificial but the results are assessed by people.
Virtual World or Real World
As the amount of automation within a business increases, the potential for two or businesses to interact in an automated way increases.
A person selecting a product on a website can trigger a massive sequence of actions across a sophisticated supply chain to ensure that the product arrives at the customer’s desired location within hours.
“They say that if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian rain forest, it can change the weather half a world away”
Catherine McKenzie
It is easy to see the analogy with the growth in automated systems.
As the explosion in AI products has shown there are many perspectives on Intelligence. The business case for Automation is strong, the challenge in many situations is to ensure that there is some human intelligence monitoring the activity so that the “Butterfly” does not cause a tsunami.
The 1980’s phrase “have your people talk to my people to do lunch”, was artificial and did not have the automated systems to make it happen every time it was said.
Imagine it being said in a Zoom or Teams meeting today, with the automated note takers having access to personal calendars, restaurant booking systems, etc. The impact could be rapid without some intelligence to mange the command driven actions that can so easily occur in our daily dialogues.
Future Business Life
Automation of business activities will continue to increase using the technology which ever label (i.e. RPA, AI, GenAI, BPM, Low Code) that is used.
The big challenge is not what to automate, as that should be almost everything but how to ensure human intelligence is correctly engaged to monitor and control the automation.
