How Intelligent Automation Helps Businesses Beat Rising Costs

When winter's on the horizon, giving your car a tune-up, changing worn tires, and lubricating essential moving parts are all critical steps to avoid freeze-ups and mishaps further down the road. In the same way, businesses that prepare well when the economic climate looks set to become more challenging will enjoy a smoother ride ahead. 

Companies can protect themselves by investing in digital transformation when faced with the mounting threat of an economic slowdown, soaring costs, and labor shortages. What's more, deploying technology like Intelligent Automation (IA) not only helps businesses weather the storm but it enables them to gain a competitive edge and emerge stronger when the situation improves.

This article will examine how Intelligent Automation works to lower business costs and enables companies to counter economic headwinds in a simple yet robust manner.

A step-up from Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

When RPA first emerged as a standalone solution, it was sold to organizations with the promise that it would “transform your enterprise”. Yet as our CEO Ronen Lamdan aptly identified in his article on the shift to Intelligent Automation, RPA is limited as its rule-based and deterministic bots could only automate a single process. This has caused up to 50% of RPA projects to fail, presenting added costs to organizations. 

Intelligent Automation serves as an upgrade to RPA, unlocking the bots’ strict boundaries to help them learn and evolve with the processes that they automate. According to Deloitte and Blue Prism’s whitepaper on Intelligent Automation, Intelligent Automation augments RPA with the capability to mimic human behaviors like perceiving, gathering evidence, and reasoning. In turn, RPA bots are enhanced with the ability to use existing information and historical data to learn, forecast, and anticipate.

Using AI-powered RPA, Intelligent Automation simplifies processes and improves operational efficiencies, helping organizations transition into frictionless enterprises that help them to reduce costs and even achieve substantial savings. Specifically, Deloitte and Blue Prism found that Intelligent Automation has reliably reduced business process costs by an average of 25 percent to 40 percent.

Strategic Intelligent Automation implementation is key

While Intelligent Automation carries the potential to simplify your business processes and keep costs low, this can only be achieved when it is strategically applied to your organization. Every organization has its own separate set of needs and culture, so it’s important to ensure that the use of Intelligent Automation is tailored to your specific requirements. 

According to Forbes, the strategizing process begins with identifying the three primary types of Intelligent Automation, which are as follows:

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• Basic automation: Involves repetitive tasks that are simple to understand and organize. This automation type is typically used for high-volume activities and tasks that are prone to human error.
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• Enhanced automation: Involves more specialized and sophisticated tasks like combing emails to find information. This type of automation is best used for IT, finance, and accounting.
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• Cognitive automation: Involves the use of advanced technology like AI to mimic human functions such as reasoning. This type of automation delivers the best ROI, providing detailed insights and even improves organically as the software learns and adapts to the organization it is deployed in.

At Laiye, we adopt an integrated cognitive automation approach that utilizes a blend of AI and RPA to digitize and automate the critical parts of any business. With our solution, organizations across Retail, Healthcare, and Banking & Financial Services are better equipped to innovate and operate. 

AstraZeneca: A case study

Laiye’s approach to Intelligent Automation helped biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca achieve cost savings of at least 50% for compliance consulting. Before engaging Laiye, AstraZeneca was inundated with large volumes of repetitive reimbursements, meetings, and customer queries that intensified during month-ends and events.

To prevent employee burnout and improve organizational efficiency, AstraZeneca turned to Laiye’s Intelligent Automation solutions to tackle the challenges it faced. We built an AI-powered conversational robot for AstraZeneca that was capable of handling its high volume of compliance consultations.

Thanks to this robot, AstraZeneca was able to reduce more than 50% of its business costs in the span of three months. This is because the robot is able to respond to queries quickly and accurately -— in fact, it boasts an accuracy rate of over 90% and a trigger rate of 98% for smart recommendations. 

Intelligent Automation, the Laiye way

As AstraZeneca’s success story reveals, Intelligent Automation does not just empower businesses and people to work better — it also helps them to cut costs in the long run. 

At Laiye, our all-in-one Intelligent Automation platform expertly weaves Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and AI together to bring massive benefits to any organization. Apart from cutting costs, it also reduces implementation time to create a smooth and seamless experience for end-users.

In the long run, Intelligent Automation will not just help organizations overcome economic challenges, but also go on to boost staff morale as it takes the burden of mundane tasks off them. In turn, staff retention will be improved as employees are assigned to work on tasks that build on their strengths and help them to grow.

Want to find out how the Laiye all-in-one Intelligent Automation platform can transform your organization? Contact our friendly team today.