The COVID-19 Pandemic has caused significant disruption to companies throughout the world. This in turn has caused business owners to look to solutions that can help their businesses during these times. Automation as a solution has become a clear winner in recent times.
We expect organizations to continue their push towards a more digital focussed business model, which will take advantage of automated operations.
Gartner has reported three main trends they expect for 2022:
An increase in overall data and data diversity will drive organizations toward new compute and storage technologies.
The pace of automation is accelerating, with more organizations creating fully automated value chains.
CIOs and other technology leadership positions are evolving into customer experience and operations positions.
The key point here is the expected trend on automation growth in 2022. It is widely believed that we are heading towards what we are calling ‘Hyper Automation’. This is a form of automation that will push home the impact of operational improvements through automation measures. The expectation by Gartner is that by 2024 organizations will lower their operational costs by 30% with a combined effort of hyper-automation implementation and changes to processes to aid efficiency gains.
This has primarily been driven by the economic uncertainty we saw during the pandemic. Organizations have desperately sought solutions that would help them maintain efficiency even with a workforce that might be incapacitated due to mass severe illness. Throughout the pandemic, organizations were cutting costs throughout their business. Despite this, we have seen a growth in spending towards digital transformation. It has been one of the only areas which have experienced increased spending.
We expect the manufacturing industry to be impacted heavily by automation. By 2025, expectations are that manufacturing facilities will produce, pack, ship, and deliver 20% of their products without any touch of human hands. Therefore, the purchaser of the product will be the first person to lay their hands on the product at any stage in its manufacturing process.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is also vastly improving as it becomes more popular. 2022 will see further growth in this area, and there will be a significant gain (up to 25%) in terms of the number of tasks that will be able to run through an RPA platform. This will impact data processing units, front-office administration, and the central infrastructure of businesses the most.
Automation Focus Industries
2022 will be the year where automation focuses on certain industries more than others. It is clear that automation is applicable in many industries, but we expect growth to be strongest in a set area.
Retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and utilities are likely to see the largest amount of growth benefit from automation in 2022. These industries have benefited from automation in the most obvious areas (manual admin tasks etc). However, in 2022, we will see more usage in further areas such as sales, customer engagement, and perhaps most importantly, helping to improve workforce satisfaction within their role. It is starting to be believed that automating the boring repetitive tasks within an organization can lead to an increase in workforce morale, as they are then able to focus on the more enjoyable aspects of their job.
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