By Janus Boye
Thanks to our friends at BBL Pivotal for hosting our 1st group meeting of the new learning season in rainy Oslo. And thanks to everyone who joined us for some thought-provoking conversations on automation, AI, employee experience and much more.
When you say business automation, it’s a topic that’s been heavily influenced by aggressive vendor marketing and where the vendors have long been setting the agenda. That’s not unusual for emerging tech, but given the substantial investments in automation, it’s about time to think more about value, and perhaps a bit less about the ever changing tech.
For our local chapters focused on Business Automation, this quarter was really focused on thinking less automation-first and more value-first.
While the specifics of our conversations in the group meetings are confidential, this post is written in the spirit of sharing and summarises some of the bigger topics happening.
We held meetings in Norway, Denmark and Germany and rather than going through the meetings chronologically, let’s start with the elephant in the room: AI.
In Oslo we covered, what you could call the ‘dark side’ of AI.
Let’s be honest: AI is not working
As Kristine Vik Andresen from Santander eloquently said in our Oslo meeting: “Though many of us in the tech space stand to gain immensely, we have a responsibility: ensuring the rewards of AI benefit not just the few.”
Do an image search for 'low income jobs' and study the search results for just a short while.
While AI is creating thousands of new jobs and opportunities, it's also removing almost as many jobs. In the future, it will remove the need for even more jobs. Unfortunately, at the moment it looks like this shift will benefit those who already have, much more so than those less fortunate.
As Kristine Vik Andresen from Santander said on the slide at our group meeting in Oslo:
"AI is not the tide that lifts all boats - mostly just the yachts."
There's a huge shift happening, and we need to think about how to create a more inclusive society with opportunities for all.
It was a refreshing and sombering discussion and quite a departure from the sometimes deafening hype of artificial intelligence. Most of our members follow vendors like UiPath who are now focused on AI at work or BluePrism, who keep talking about intelligent automation, and they rarely, if ever, touch on these ‘dark side’ aspects. The discussion was really a good reminder that our members are focused on implementing the technology in large, complex and often global organisations and take on a wider responsibility to really make things work.
Let’s move onto something that’s perhaps a bit more on the desk of many of our members.
How do you come to a company-wide automation strategy
Gurdeep Singh is IT Tools Innovation Lead at insurance firm Tryg in Copenhagen and a long-time part of our community. In a guest talk to our German group, he shared both the obvious - there’s no silver bullet - and also a very helpful list of critical elements for your automation strategy
Connecting to the theme of value-first, Gurdeep said:
Ideate and innovate to generate value and not to automate
He also stressed the need to govern to innovate and talked about being brutally constructive and how each limitation you run into leads to a step towards innovation. Furthermore, Gurdeep stressed the importance of ‘daring to fail’ and how collaboration is the key to co-creating a strategy that actually works.
We had an open discussion about Gurdeep’s cookbook and list of ingredients, so that each member could customise and create their own company-wide automation strategy based on their own organisation.
What happens after a few years of automation?
In several group meetings, we used the opportunity to reflect on what happens when automation has been in place for several years.
One member raised the point of how key process knowledge is lost (what does our robot actually do?) and we also talked about how documentation is a familiar pain point. Some members have very extensive documentation that they clearly invest heavily in, while others have far less and perhaps a more pragmatic approach.
We also covered the need to decommission, or simply shut down, robots that have fulfilled their purpose. Few organisations seem to have mature processes in place for this.
Once again, governance came up as the key to scaling and the key to long-term success with business automation.
Looking towards 2024 when it comes to automation & AI
Our Copenhagen-based member Gurdeep Singh from Tryg gave a guest talk at the Oslo meeting on the topic of AI Sandbox. That session was later turned into a blog post, which you can find here: Introducing AI Sandbox.
Why not join us and be a part of the conversation? We meet next at the Boye Aarhus 23 conference in November, which has a dedicated Business Automation conference track moderated by Gurdeep.
One of the key conversations in Q2 this year was all about how to avoid RPA vendor lock-in, in particular given a steep increase in license costs at the major vendors (incl. BluePrism, UiPath).
Our local automation peer group meetings resume once we have landed in 2024.