Hello, everyone.
I hope you're fine, and I'm sure you're enjoying this event.
It's a pleasure for me to be part of this wonderful event.
Today, I'm thrilled to share with you about intelligent automation,
also called hyperautomation or cognitive automation.
The insights I will present are coming from a book
called Intelligent Automation, harnessing AI
to boost business and make our world more human.
This is the first book dedicated to this new feat.
And this is the reason why it took 18 months
to my coauthors Ian Barkin, Jochen Wirtz, and to myself, to write it.
The book has been released months ago, and we are very happy.
It has been an Amazon bestseller since then.
Before I start,
note that I will often use the acronym IA to refer to intelligent automation.
Let us start with a few awful pictures
that I, and I believe all of us, don't want to see anymore.
This picture shows some of the realities of our world today
that IA aims at changing forever.
I took this picture last year
while supporting the finance department at a multinational company.
Looking at this,
it is not surprising that according to Gallup research,
eighty-five percent of employees worldwide are not fulfilled by their work.
They think it is too manual, repetitive, and tedious.
IA enables to free up employees from laborious and transactional tasks,
and it refocuses them on more value-added and exciting work activities.
It augments them, transforming them into superhumans,
able to generate insights from millions of data in just a few seconds.
Now, let's move to the next picture.
Believe me, I took these two pictures only a few months ago.
This is still the customer experience that we can see today,
spending hours in a queue to meet with a bank agent
or to get train tickets.
Ninety-six percent of unhappy customers don't bother complaining,
and 91 percent of them will simply leave and never return.
Based on my experience with IA,
companies can increase customer satisfaction by over 50 percent
while reducing the contact center workload by over 50 percent.
This picture shows that
more than 80 percent of healthcare organizations
are meeting issues with their physicians facing burnout.
The causes are diverse,
including heavy workload and pressure from the patients
and from their families for more insight.
According to our research,
IA has the potential to save over 10 million lives per year
by supporting clinical trials and disease diagnosis,
and avoiding medical errors.
The first picture on this slide shows a beach in India.
I took this picture in December last year.
The second picture shows a poor kid in Vietnam.
We all agree that we need to cherish our planet
and to help other people,
but do we actually dedicate the time, effort, and attention
to solve these pressing issues of our world?
Honestly, not really.
We are too busy with our work,
with our full-time jobs to try to feed our kids and ourselves.
What if we had more time for ourselves, for others, and for our planet?
What if IA could provide us with this time?
IA could then help us to make our world more human.
Now what is IA?
IA aims at automating end-to-end processes on computers.
It delivers business outcomes on behalf of the employees,
working hand in hand with them.
It chooses a combination of methods involving people,
organizations and processes, and technologies.
At the technology level, if this circle is AI,
artificial intelligence, which is mimicking human intelligence,
if this circle is software robotics,
mimicking human motor capability in a software-based environment,
and this circle is workflow and cloud platforms,
enabling data entry, routing, and storage,
IA simply sits at the crossroad of these fields.
As a result, IA increases process speeds, reduces costs,
enhances compliance and quality, and optimizes decision outcomes,
ultimately and significantly improves customer
and employee experience, and boosts revenue.
How does IA work?
Here is a very simple framework to explain it.
IA is achieved by mimicking four capabilities
that employees use in performing their work activities.
It includes the vision, the execution,
the language, and thinking and learning.
As you can see in this framework, people are in the center.
They are a critical component to ensure the success of IA.
Indeed, IA is built by people, for people.
Each of these capabilities leverages the portfolio of technologies.
Vision is the equivalent of the eyes of the digital workforce,
supported by computer vision.
For example, tissue analytics
make it possible for anyone to access free online diagnosis
and care support from anywhere at any time.
It diagnoses, instantly, chronic wounds, burns, skin conditions,
just by analyzing a photo from a smartphone.
Execution is the hands and legs,
supported by robotic process automation,
smart workflows, and APIs.
Language is like the mouth and ears, supported by natural language processing.
Thinking and learning capability are similar to our brain,
supported by machine learning.
For example, this system leverages machine learning
to access the level of attention and engagement of students.
It calculates an attention score,
which you can see on the right side of the screen.
And this is very useful for educators,
because it helps them to adapt the mix of school subjects
and to identify when a break is needed.
The benefits are the capacity to maintain student engagement
and optimize learning time.
But despite these wonderful capabilities,
while more than 50 percent of organizations around the world
have started their IA journey, according to Deloitte,
less than 15 percent of them have been able to scale it,
according to McKinsey.
The question now is then how to succeed an IA transformation.
According to our experience and research,
companies which were successful had all implemented five initiatives.
To start with, they have implemented two fundamentals.
First is always put people in the center of an IA transformation.
IA is built by people for people.
Without people, there is no IA. Without IA there are still people.
Second, start with a strong and healthy foundation.
Management support and sponsorship,
capability building, and change management.
Thirdly, combine the IA capabilities to create synergies
and be able to automate complex end-to-end processes.
For example, here is a client onboarding process for a bank.
It is fully automated, end to end,
by combining different IA technologies
such as robotic process automation, computer vision,
machine learning, APIs and more.
While this process used to take up to 20 days to onboard a client,
it can now be performed in minutes.
As a result, it provides higher customer and employee experience,
and reduces cost by more than 50 percent.
Number four, democratize IA by using technologies
such as local platforms that require limited skills
to build IA applications.
They make IA accessible to most business users.
As a result, they accelerate the speed of the transformation,
drive higher ownership and acceptance of IA,
and allow the shift of the company's culture
to more digitalization and automation.
For example, created by MIT,
Virtual Data Scientist, VDS,
runs on machine learning predictions through an intuitive user interface,
available on smartphones and tablets.
Let us take the example of a medical doctor
who wants to understand the correlation between the age of the patient
and the likelihood of having a blood disease.
The doctor just combines two of the boxes that you can see on this video
corresponding to data feature blood disease and data feature age.
As a result, the interface automatically displays
a bar chart of the patients' age distribution.
Number five, accelerate IA implementation by leveraging technology.
For example, process discovery,
process mining, data discovery,
auto-machine learning, automated maintenance.
For example, released a few months ago,
TabNine is an auto completer that helps to write code faster.
It embeds a deep learning model
which provides high-quality suggestions to developers.
TabNine has been trained on more than two million files
from GitHub.
Beyond business efficiency,
how does IA help to make our world more human?
According to our research, IA has the potential to save
ten-plus million lives per year.
It can double our global budget for health and for education.
It could eliminate hunger forever.
It is able to augment 30 percent of current work activities
while automating and eliminating the rest.
IA acts as a catalyst to reinvent work and education.
IA represents an opportunity to refocus our society
on the most fundamental human values.
Because of time constraints, I won't be able to address these points today,
but I will be glad to do so in the future.
The contents that I've just shared is coming from the first reference book
dedicated to IA and hyperautomation.
It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Profits from the book's sales will be donated to charities
in charge of educating people in need of new technologies.
Through this book, my coauthors and I have worked
toward establishing IA as a real feat with its own frameworks,
use cases, methods, and critical success factors.
I'm sure you will find it extremely useful and insightful.
It was a real pleasure to share my passion with you today.
Thanks a lot for your time.