A study by market research firm IDC found that 40 percent of the top 2,000 enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region plan to double the use of intelligent automation in knowledge retention, dissemination and information synthesis by 2026 to overcome human errors and fill the skills vacuum in the data lifecycle.
This is because artificial intelligence and automation can effectively combat human error by taking up the heavy lifting involved in parsing, analyzing, drilling down and dissecting impossibly large volumes of data. It can also perform high-level arithmetic, logical and statistical functions at a scale that would otherwise be impossible by human-led, self-service analytics alone.
Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, director of research at ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corp., says automation has evolved over the years.
“Intelligent automation is how automation has naturally evolved over the years. We are moving from process automation to decision automation. Traditional process automation involved us writing a certain set of rules to run the automation. By using technologies like AI and ML [machine learning], we can learn patterns from the past and automate decisions and create these rules as we go,” he says.
Ramamoorthy, who joined ManageEngine in 2011, says stronger decision automation techniques can optimize processes and maximize revenue for companies. They can help employees become more productive and ensure customer satisfaction by scanning through a lot of patterns from past data.
Redundant tasks, like assigning a help desk ticket to a particular agent after a human reads through it, can be automated now, thereby leading to a reduced MTTR (mean time to repair) and better efficiency in the process, he says.
Industries that embraced digitization are the early adopters of AI. Such industries include IT, healthcare, banking, financial services, insurance and e-commerce.
Citing an example, Ramamoorthy says a good digital experience could be a key differentiator for an e-commerce company. “Nobody would want to visit a website that is slow to respond or has an unreliable payment gateway integration. A better digital experience can be enabled for online shoppers by using a plethora of intelligent automation techniques at the back end,” he says.
Intelligent automation can enable powerful anomaly detection and create a benchmark response time based on the number of visitors at a given time. Intelligent automation can also help the business optimize operating costs by enabling capacity planning through forecasting, he says.
The security of the e-commerce website can be strengthened by the automation system, which looks at the past data and creates ad hoc rules for each of the users and entities involved in the system. It can also identify malware, DDoS attacks and other threats and help mitigate them, he says.
Ramamoorthy says AI and automation are now also accessible to small and medium enterprises. “Gone are the days when the entry barrier to AI and automation was very high. At ManageEngine, we have built AI that can learn from a small amount of training data, which is usually all that small and medium-sized businesses have available. Our AI can also perform model inferences with limited computing power. So now is the time for small and medium-sized businesses to get AI involved in their everyday processes,” he says.
ManageEngine is the IT enterprise management division of Zoho Corp., which manages end-to-end technology infrastructure for businesses. With over 50 enterprise products, it’s a one-stop-shop for all IT essentials for every business kind or size.
ManageEngine’s wide-range of IT management solutions—from cybersecurity, cloud computing, IT analytics, remote work management, to unified endpoint management and security—allows users to collaborate with colleagues and clients seamlessly from any part of the world.
Ramamoorthy says ManageEngine, with its cost-effective advanced suite for IT management, can help companies craft better digital experiences for customers. “We are a completely bootstrapped, profitable company with zero external funding, and we believe in building deep technical expertise,” he says.