Automation of business processes is becoming more and more common, and generative AI is just one aspect of this trend.
By 2023, the use of generative AI in business processes had grown 400%, with RevOps being the largest adopters with 48% of use cases and IT coming in second with 31%. Unexpectedly, customer service trailed behind at 12%.
Over the last two years, the number of extremely difficult automation cases has nearly doubled, and 50% of automation instances involve four or more departments. The results are from Workato, a job automation company, which issued its “2024 Work Automation Index” this week.
Additional important discoveries. The research, which was based on a survey of more than 1,000 medium-sized and corporate Workato clients, discovered that the rise of generative AI as well as economic headwinds and the restrictions they create are both driving automation.
- Leading the way in process automation are operations roles. In 2023, business operations teams achieved automation of 27.7% of all procedures.
- There are more programs and steps involved in automated operations, which makes them more complex.
- IT still creates 56% of automations, but it also serves as a coach for the 44% created by other business teams.
- 11% of automations still include people, such as when it comes to approvals.
Why it matters to us. This is a perfect storm created by the meeting of two distinct but related tendencies. First, the movement towards the automated enterprise, which is probably going to cause some types of manual occupations to disappear. In his book “The New Automation Mindset,” published in 2023, Workato CEO Vijay Tella discussed this trend.
That pattern exists without the use of generative AI. In other words, if ChatGPT and related programs hadn’t made generative AI available to non-enterprise users, a great deal of manual business procedures would have been automated. Of fact, genAI is significantly speeding up automation since it can actually build (even code) business processes in response to natural language commands.
The fact that RevOps is setting the standard for genAI is intriguing to marketers.