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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
The Automation Advantage summary
Bhaskar Ghosh
Embrace the Future of Productivity and Improve Speed, Quality, and Customer Experience Through AI
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3.9 (117 ratings)
22 mins
6 key ideas
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What is The Automation Advantage about?
The Automation Advantage (2021) provides a roadmap for building automation and AI in a modern organization. From the different stages a business must go through on its automation journey to the best ways to reassure employees worried about job destruction, it shows leaders how to prosper in a future world.
About the Author
Dr. Bhaskar Ghosh is chief strategy officer at Accenture, the multinational professional services company. As well as strategy, he’s responsible for investments, ventures, and acquisitions at Accenture. He holds a PhD in business management from Utkal University in India.
Gayathri Pallail is the associate director for automation strategy and deployment at Accenture. A conference speaker, she’s an innovator in automation analytics, prediction models, and tools to deliver effective automation.
Rajendra Prasad directs Accenture’s myWizard, an intelligent automation platform that has AI at its heart. He’s appeared at industry events such as the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference, and has published his papers on technology in IEEE and Harvard Business Review.
Table of Contents
Key idea 1 of 6
Automating your systems and AI technologies should make business sense.
Let’s begin by defining a term which will come up frequently in these blinks: Intelligent automation.
When the authors use the term, they mean the use of machines to automate tasks like data analysis and decision-making, including the follow-up actions and learnings that stem from those. Yes, these are typically tasks that are still performed by humans, which might set a few alarm bells ringing in people's minds. But don’t waste that energy worrying – Ghosh, Pallail, & Prasad’s work shows us how we can make intelligent automation benefit teams and businesses in our ever-changing technological landscapes.
Take the example of one of Italy’s leading newspapers, Il Secolo XIX. Long at the forefront of innovation in the newspaper business, pioneering color printing, a digital presence, and integrated newsrooms, Il Secolo XIX nevertheless faced serious challenges.
The leadership realized that if they didn’t change fast to keep up with the digital world, they’d fall behind. They knew that they needed to produce high-quality, cost-effective journalism to sustain and grow their readership.
Their solution? They introduced something called a virtual assistant. The AI technology would quickly check pieces of journalism for grammatical errors while also scouring the internet for surprising links. This meant that journalists at Il Secolo XIX could reference sources and previous news items that might have escaped their attention – the end product being in-depth, expansive pieces of writing that readers would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.
It meant that the journalists could spend their time writing great journalism, while the machine did the tiring research and proofreading. Rather than making the human writers at Il Secolo XIX redundant, the virtual assistant simply allowed them to do their jobs better.
This is a great example of how leadership saw an opportunity not only to improve their key metrics, like maintaining and growing their readership, but to adapt so that the journalists could do their best work, at scale. It also shows us the necessity and value of aligning business strategies with intelligent automation and integrated AI.
So, let’s get practical – how can you set your business on the right path by integrating intelligent automation with your business strategies and systems? Well, as a leader in your business, you have to begin by asking yourself the right questions: Where do you want to take your business or organization? What does the future look like for your industry? Will developments there affect how your business value is defined a few years down the line? In answering these key questions, you can then implement a clear strategy that will allow your leadership teams to think through all the components and systems, resources, and boundaries that need to be reviewed and aligned.
Basically, what you need to remember here is that while the goal of automating repetitive work and freeing up human potential is a great one, it must also make business sense. For automation and AI integration to really take off at your organization, you need to have a serious strategy.
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Who should read The Automation Advantage
- Business leaders looking to automate
- Employees at companies set to flirt with AI
- Anyone interested in how tech will transform the world
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