Intelligent Automation on the Rise in APAC
- By CDOTrend editors
- December 20, 2019
Intelligent Automation (IA) is on the rise in the Asia Pacific, says a trio of digital and automation leaders from advisory firm Ernst & Young (EY).
According to Benson Ng, Steve Au Yeung and David Ashton from EY, the increase in use of IA technologies is evidenced in ASEAN, too, though the region is still in its early stages compared to the U.S. and China.
Priority for IA
IA investment is increasingly a priority in organizations here. For China, the use and integration of IA technologies serve to help the country augment existing capabilities and develop new ones. This focus is especially evident given the current trade dispute between the U.S. and China.
Against this backdrop, Chinese firms are also compelled to focus more on domestic and new market development than overseas. Even AI unicorns in China now need to grow more based on domestic and new market consumption, capital and supply chain, says EY.
China is hence supporting the development and use of key IA and human augmentation technologies to sustain future growth across industries. This is culminating with the increased integration of IA with technologies such as smarter Optical Character Recognition (OCR), development of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and chatbots.
Opportunities ahead
What are some of the opportunities ahead for organizations to leverage IA?
Some ways that IA technologies can be utilized to improve and augment existing capabilities include using RPA to improve automation in Shared Services Center (SSC), and the exploration of the further application scenarios for IA within enterprises. Moreover, tech giants are increasingly seeking to integrate smart applications and offer them as API services that can be easily accessed through the cloud.
Challenges do exist. For instance, accurate, complete and effective data sets coupled with an effective algorithm model are required to achieve accurate results. For many organizations, being able to advance on this front will require the implementation of good data governance, as well as model design to assist in the transformation to an IA-centric track.
“We see increased development and promotion of intelligent automation technologies across industries regionally as companies seek to utilize IA technologies to improve existing capabilities and simultaneously embrace new frontiers when it comes to more complex systems,” said Benson Ng, a digital advisory leader for EY in China.