The rise of the digital workforce and the digital skills rollout, as automation becomes mainstream, will be among seven big trends that will reshape how India works from 2023.

As per Scott Hunter, vice president, strategic engagements and transformation lead for APJ, UiPath, an enterprise automation software company, automation is becoming an integral component in the digital transformation journey of every Indian organisation.

According to the UiPath-commissioned IDC APJ Automation Survey 2022, 84% of Indian organisations will scale up their robotic process automation (RPA) initiatives or achieve an enterprise-wide RPA deployment by 2025.

UiPath lists the following top seven trends in the automation space for India. 

Automation will be enterprise’s new way of operating and innovating

The C-suite has come to understand and embrace the true potential of automation in driving business transformation and value. Enterprise-wide automation introduces 40% greater productivity and efficiency improvements over piecemeal automation alone.

By elevating automation, they’re elevating its impact which leads to a better experience for both customers and employees and results in more value and more revenue. Based on the IDC APJ Automation Survey 2022 commissioned by UiPath, 88% of Indian organisations agree that automation will be a critical requirement for business excellence, customer experience, and competitive success in the next three years.  

Businesses ramp up automation to counteract growing labour and inflation pressure

From driving down costs to attracting and retaining top talent, automation helps executives tackle tough financial challenges.

According to another UiPath study, 85% believe automation can help reduce turnover and attract new workers. Automation can help on multiple fronts: By expanding automation efforts, organisations can enhance the productivity of the workers they have—while creating a more attractive work environment to land (and keep) top talent.

In the coming years, executives are realising the best way to beat inflation is to outwork it. 78% plan to further invest in automation to fill staffing gaps. In both cases, automation can help teams do more with the same resources. According to the report, in India, 82% of employees would like improvement in operational efficiencies and streamlined processes.

Digital CIOs step up their role and automation to meet new goals

CIOs are building a new digitally focused foundation for growth across the enterprise—and automation is key to their plans.

As per the Global Study of CIOs, August  2022,  90% of CIOs say their role has expanded into new areas like analytics, ESG, talent acquisition, and sales and marketing. Cybersecurity, cloud, data, AI—these are the key areas they’ve been investing in to bring those benefits to light.

Now, CIOs are discovering that automation is the new core tool in their arsenal—not only offering its own benefits but also improving those other tools in their own right. In fact, according to a report by Foundry, 54% of CIOs are automating business and IT processes to drive revenue.  

Process mining and automated testing become “must-haves” in driving best-in-class, enterprise-wide automation

Today, new automated discovery tools like process mining and task mining apply advanced AI to system logs and users’ work patterns, identifying bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and opportunities to improve across entire systems, workflows, and departments.

As per the 21st Annual State of the CIO survey, 82% of executives believe process mining drives better automation outcomes. This key data can then be used to create new or more valuable processes—even before you automate them.

Low-code becomes top priority for getting automation and AI into more people’s hands

Today’s automation platforms offer unique low- or no-code capabilities -- that is, the ability to work with simple drag-and-drop visual interfaces, rather than complex programming.

According to an IDC report published in September 2022, 29% more processes become automated when companies introduce citizen development programmes. Now, users at all levels can quickly, and easily create more of the unique automation, data models, and apps they need.

New AI-powered innovations push automation’s boundaries even further

Advanced communications mining can extract the unstructured content contained within various messages—emails, calls, chats, and service tickets—and transform it into workable data used to train natural language processing (NLP) models.

As per the Precedence Research report in 2022, 39% CAGR for NLP has been predicted through 2030. Common questions and requests will be handled automatically, and detailed customer insights will be gathered along the way.  

Rounding out digital skills to be the next hot issue for HR and IT leadership

Organisations will need to develop a comprehensive training and development plan focusing on reskilling and upskilling across teams and units, which only 46% of Indian organisations are currently doing according to the IDC APJ Automation Survey 2022.

Additionally, as more organisations integrate automation in the work of non-IT domain employees, Indian respondents highlighted that collaboration with IT (54%), approval from senior leadership (20%), and clear guidance on best practices (14%), are the key requirements for successful implementations.

Every team member will need fresh digital-centered skills at their disposal. HR and IT departments will need to work together to hire, train, and upskill this new caliber of workers—with less focus on the transactional and repetitive, and more on delivering the greatest value from automation efforts. 

2022 brought us chaos, but also the opportunity to review, renew, and advance. Read the end-2022 issue of People Matters Digital Magazine for a look back, and some key takeaways to bring forward.