Reimagining the Post Pandemic Future: Leveraging the benefits of Hyperautomation

The outbreak of the pandemic has significantly altered the digital landscape and how industries operated. As we study the resulting impact on the supply side for businesses and the demand side for consumers, it is evident that technology played a crucial role in adapting to the changing environment and enabling resilience.

Subsequently, the challenges during the pandemic lead organizations to adopt technology solutions at a faster pace to ensure business continuity. Several organizations worldwide have embarked on a digitization strategy because it was the only means to survive the pandemic. As industries are heading towards recovery, leveraging the benefits of technologies is crucial to ensure productivity, profitability, adaptability, and resilience. Hyperautomation solutions play a crucial role in future-proofing operations with minimal investments as organizations focus on digital transformation to embrace the post-pandemic future.

According to a McKinsey study, the pace of digitization accelerated the customer and supply-chain interactions by a good three-to-four years. The study further states that the share of digital products accelerated by a good seven years.

On the demand side, the pandemic forced consumers to move online and access services remotely. At the height of the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of customer interactions were online, as per the same report. Interestingly, the changes in buying behavior and customer interactions are likely to stay even in the post-pandemic era.

Hyperautomation: Tools to enable Digital Self-Serve

As the world emerges from the impact of the pandemic, hyperautomation solutions will power digital self-services to take center stage connecting businesses with customers. With customers opening bank accounts remotely, consulting doctors online, interacting with governments via citizen self-serve, and so on, the scope of tech-enabled services keeps expanding from time to time.

All this implies that there will be a gradual shift away from the traditional back-office towards self-serve. From a hyperautomation standpoint, this shift will see a considerable boost from low-code platforms with favorable B2C type interactions. Rich and sophisticated user experiences centered around simplicity and ease of use will be in demand. New user experiences will break ground allowing more flexibility and improved speed-to-solution.

In addition to B2C type low-code portals, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics will be in demand. For example, organizations will deploy AI technologies heavily to assist customer interactions. Organizations will use Doc.AI technologies to validate business documents such as passports, licenses, bank statements, etc., without the need for human assistance. To help customers with their self-serve capabilities, organizations will deploy image and video AI technologies, such as those required for face recognition, employee safety evaluation, etc. The trend will result in redefining job roles with digital workforce taking over mundane and repeated tasks all-day long while humans focusing on qualitative roles that require critical thinking, creativity, empathy, and cognitive skills.

Once the customers are used to a digital self-serve, as a next step, recommendation engines powered by AI models will slowly proliferate even as interactions with specialists such as relationship managers or advisors will become more and more expensive. Reports show that nearly one-third of Amazon’s sales and three-fourths of Netflix’s sales come from recommendation engines. We can only see this trend augmenting further as AI engines would recommend the stocks we invest in, the doctor we visit, the clothes we buy, or even who we date.

In Conclusion

In summary, hyperautomation technologies will guide digital transformation journeys of enterprises ensuring them to become more digital savvy and embracing digital business transformation. You can think of digitization akin to laying those hi-speed freeways. In the post-pandemic era, we can expect organizations to further accelerate the digital experiences by bringing in a plethora of hyperautomation technologies to differentiate themselves, move fast, and to earn customer loyalty.

Hyperautomation technologies such as AI (Doc.AI, Image AI, Recommendations AI), analytics, and B2C portals backed by low-code can offer significant benefits to companies that look for differentiation. These technologies form the bulwark of the post-pandemic digitization experiences that customers expect to drive. The solutions will support organizations connecting industries and departments to continue innovating and provide unique solutions to customers which have not existed before.

As enterprises across industries prepare to evolve to thrive in the post-pandemic future, hyperautomation technologies will offer them immediate quantitative and qualitative results with minimal investments compared to infrastructure expansion and other alternatives. With the market environment transforming to future-proof operations and ensure business continuity, digitizing operations powered by hyperautomation will be crucial for organizations.

Author: Narendran Thillaisthanam, Chief Technology Officer, Vuram