The Automation Dilemma-Are You Innovating or Following the Crowd?
Your biweekly infusion of actionable business insights on AI and automation, drawn from real-world experience, to help you elevate your automation strategies at work.
Automation has the potential to drive incredible innovation, but only when it is pursued with purpose and intention. True innovation is rooted in curiosity, creativity, and a desire to solve meaningful problems. When automation initiatives are driven by inspiration, they are designed with intention and purpose. In contrast, trend-driven automation is reactive, often motivated by external pressures rather than internal needs. Hence, before embarking on your innovation/automation journey, it’s critical to understand your "why" behind the journey.
The Importance of understanding your "Why?" behind Automation:
By understanding the “why” behind automation, businesses can avoid the traps of obligation and peer pressure, focusing instead on solutions that truly add value. In doing so, they can unlock the full potential of automation to transform their operations, empower their people, and achieve lasting success.
The best way to understand your organization's why is to ask and reflect on the following critical questions:
What problem are we trying to solve? Clearly define the pain points or inefficiencies that automation will address.
How does automation align with our goals? Ensure that the initiative supports your broader strategic vision and objectives.
What does success look like? Establish measurable outcomes to track the impact of automation.
How will this impact our people? Consider how automation will affect employees, customers and other stakeholders and ensure they are part of the process.
By taking the time to reflect on these questions, organizations can shift their focus from obligation to inspiration, ensuring that automation efforts are both meaningful and impactful.
Context switching is the silent productivity killer and battling context switching fatigue is no joke. Below is a real-life use-case of how a purpose led automation helped in delivering great results for overcoming context-switching in employees in one of the organizations I worked for.
A Use Case of Purpose-Led Automation - Overcoming Context Switching Fatigue
This showcase focuses on a leader in the data center and digital infrastructure space who we will call ZapCo for the purpose of this article. Like many other companies, ZapCo realised that the employee experience in daily operations could be greatly improved by reducing their team's involvement in low-value and repetitive tasks and saw opportunities for reducing manual effort in processes such as:
Performing background checks in onboarding process.
Ensuring employee compliance with post-pandemic, return-to-work protocols.
Saving hours in a work day by automating these manual processes is great, but they wanted to go beyond simple efficiency gains by automating rule-based processes.
The head of product management for data and analytics at ZapCo knew several examples of hard tasks that were crushing employee morale. The problem was that these were not just simple data entry tasks, entry were higher-order functions that involved analysis and decision-making. This challenge was not for the faint of heart -- yet the executive wanted to see how far automation could go.
The first project ZapCo focused on was service ticket automation. They receive an average of 30,000 service emails per day. Each of these emails could require the assistance of a different team and therefore need to be triaged for the type of work that is being requested and for priority handling. Multiple team members, therefore, had to read each email as it came in and create the corresponding work order with the correct priority and team assignment. This was a highly repetitive task and using up a lot of precious employee time. High turnover in these kinds of roles can be an often-underestimated cost of poor employee experience.
In this case, ZapCo leveraged ML machine learning models to catalog or tag the type of work being requested, the priority and the name of the internal team who needed to handle this type of request. The automation was as follows:
Execute immediately when a new email was received to the customer support mailbox;
Lookup the customer record from the CRM using the domain of the sender's email;
Send the text from the body of the email to the machine learning models;
Retrieve the classifications (work type and priority) from the machine learning model;
If the confidence of the ML models is high, create a work order in the service management system. If the confidence is low, route the request for manual classification by the team.
Results:
Any requests that required manual routing were automatically "learned" by the machine learning models. This improved accuracy of the models over time and larger portions of the request were fully automated.
The team was able to move away from highly repetitive nature of work and take on new and meaningful projects.
This created a great productivity impact on ZapCo overall and is a wonderful example of purpose-led automation.
The Bigger Picture
In the current business landscape increasingly shaped by automation, the pressure to adopt the latest tools and technologies is at an all-time high. Organizations often feel the need to automate quickly to stay competitive, but this urgency begs a fundamental question: Is your automation strategy trend-driven or purpose-led?
Automation isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and it shouldn’t be driven by trends alone. When guided by purpose, automation becomes a powerful tool for innovation, efficiency, and growth. By asking tough questions about the "why" behind your automation strategy, you can ensure that your efforts are meaningful, impactful, and aligned with your organization's unique vision for success.