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  The Hardest Part of AI Transformation Isn’t the AI After twenty years and dozens of programmes, the technology was almost never the thing that decided success.   I have spent two decades leading transformation across the UK, India, and the Gulf, through waves of technology that each arrived promising to change everything. AI is the most powerful of those waves. But if you asked me what actually decided whether a programme succeeded or quietly died, my honest answer would rarely be the technology. It was almost always the people. The fear, the fatigue, the politics, the unspoken resistance in the room. The hardest part of AI transformation is human, and we under invest in it because it doesn’t fit neatly on a Gantt chart. The programme that nearly failed for no technical reason I remember a programme where every technical indicator was green. The architecture was sound, the early results were strong, the business case held. And it was dying. Not because anythi...

Robotic Process Automation in Insurance Industry

RPA) applies specific technologies to automate routine, standardized tasks in support of an enterprise’s knowledge workers. By freeing human employees from these mundane tasks to apply themselves to core business objectives, RPA offers a number of compelling benefits to the workplace. – Institute for Robotic Process Automation (IRPA) Robotic Process Automation (RPA) seems to be now crossing over the hype cycle and delivering real-world benefits in driving efficiencies, leaner processes and reducing costs and errors in processing of massive amount of demand or data driven processing systems that traditionally had a lot of human effort invested in mundane tasks. Let us take a look at some real-life business solution areas in Insurance that RPA has been able to address successfully over the last year . Insurance has some very key areas that are time consuming, data intensive as well as customer contact center based. Lot of human effort is spent on data gathering, co...

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Enhanced Customer Experience

In my last blog I talked about how, Robotic Process Automation leads to changing job roles and it’s effect on employees and employers. I take the opportunity to highlight the great multiplier effect a successful effect RPA implementation has on customer experience. A customer journey can be simple set of tasks or a complex journey. It could involve looking up information, filling information, time taken for processing forms or those long holds on telephone. Whatever be the forms of these journeys, we had some such poor experiences. This is where a successfully implemented RPA and related investments can enhance customer experience and eliminate customer pain points. How RPA transforms Customer Experience? As an example let us consider the customer journey for Loan or mortgage origination and processing. Traditionally it will require the customer to fill up many forms and information and submit required sets of documents. These would then be sent for processing. Someone ...

RPA and New Jobs

A few months ago I had written about the impact of RPA on traditional back-office and rule based activities performed by humans. The key impacts that are evidenced in various industries and by analysts are:           Jobs that had been traditionally “out-sourced” or “off-shored” are brought “in-house” or “right-shored”. This is evident in many “off-shored” or “out-sourced” services being bought back “in-house” or moved back to developed countries and economies.           The skill-sets needed for fulfilling the replaced jobs are not same as those that are being replaced. The new jobs are more to support and maintain the RPA. As an example if the “bot” hits an error in the process, it alerts for human intervention. This requires task to be performed by “specialized” human support, maintenance and QA – a new set of job roles. Who benefits? ·          Employers benefit from...

Intelligent Automation, Robotic Process Automation and it’s impact

In my last blog I touched upon Intelligent Automation broadly covering Machine Learning, Autonomics, Machine / Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. I will focus on Autonomics and it’s impact on business and IT. Autonomics are intelligent systems that apply self-adapting policies to “learn” from experience and respond to new conditions, with the potential to perform more and more complex tasks. Autonomics are entering the mainstream in back-office work performing high volumes and routine tasks. It is predicted that it will completely transform the   Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)   industry. However, the current systems are not “autonomics” in the truest sense but are evolving and will reach that stage in the near future. Traditionally robots revolutionized the manufacturing industry largely in the context of assembly lines. Now Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is impacting the back office and process related work in the same way. Whereas in manuf...

Intelligent Automation – coming of age

By 2019, the global market for content analytics, discovery and cognitive systems software is projected to reach $9.2 billion, according to IDC, more than double that of 2014. Intelligent automation is rapidly coming of age. “Smart” machines and “smart” systems and “smart” bots are becoming mainstream. Intelligent automation which is a combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation is mainstream now. It is helping businesses to achieve higher levels of efficiencies. The range of applications could be from collecting simple data to making contextual decisions to guiding autonomous vehicles. Intelligent Automation broadly covers Machine Learning, Autonomics, Machine / Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing . Machine Learning – refers to the ability of systems to improve their performance by exposure to data without explicit programs or instructions. It is the ability to automatically discover patterns in data and carry out predictions. These applicatio...

IoT impact on Financial Technology Sector – Will customer experience win over “brand value”?

Projections Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. In 2016, 5.5 million new things will get connected every day. Gartner estimates that the   Internet of Things   (IoT) will support total services spending of $235 billion in 2016, up 22 percent from 2015. Services are dominated by the professional category (in which businesses contract with external providers in order to design, install and operate IoT systems), however connectivity services (through communications service providers) and consumer services will grow at a faster pace. Implications IoT services will become the real drivers and value add. Service providers and vendors which will provide integration to third party applications will become the critical part in the value chain. Those service providers that provide the best value in terms of customer experience will win market share. Custom...