Balancing the Benefits of Hyperautomation and Need for Discretion

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In this special guest feature, Loren Goodman, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of InRule Technology, discusses how hyperautomation is a new generation of tooling to automate the acceleration of automation. Loren is responsible for InRule’s technology vision and leading the product teams to define and develop innovative product capabilities. To ensure the ongoing alignment of InRule’s products and customer needs, Loren continually engages with clients on architectural issues and implementation reviews. A programmer since the age of seven, Loren’s vision and passion has always been creating technology that empowers people to solve their own problems. To that end, he starts every presentation with “Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” His innovative solutions have been recognized by the industry for their forward-thinking approaches and application of technology.

Hyperautomation is a new generation of tooling to automate the acceleration of automation. Yes— you read that correctly—just like hyperinflation is inflation of the rate of inflation. It is geometric in its impact. 

Gartner defines hyperautomation as an approach that “enables organizations to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many processes as possible using technology, such as robotic process automation (RPA), low-code application platforms (LCAP), artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual assistants.”

Today’s enterprises have piles of legacy applications that work perfectly in their own vacuums. Just to be a part of the ecosystem requires custom integrations for internal, customer and vendor systems. As a result, data is all over the place – covering every system and every format – to the point of being a data landfill instead of valuable, actionable information.

Pair this data deluge with the race to leverage machine learning to turn existing data into game-changing assets. Machine learning operates on probabilities; left unchecked and without oversight, at some point ML is going to pull the short straw and errantly “defriend” the person who would have been an amazing lifetime customer – let alone how that can be amplified in so many ways. And the velocity is picking up. How many times have you known exactly what you want to do, you know it to be possible, and yet you have no way to automate it? Lets talk about hyperautomation.

With hyperautomation, the integrations go to a hub spoke model running on a common language and interaction fabric. The moment we solve the issues of “connect” and “automate”, we will be able to leverage, via self-service, the predictive powers of AI.

However, automation is not a panacea; it comes with its own set of risks. “Set it and forget it” is great when automation performs exactly as you intended, but what if it doesn’t? How can we ensure that we retain human discretion in this new world of automation?

What are the enterprise benefits of hyperautomation?

Before there were combustion engines; the fields still got plowed. Hyperautomation produces the same outcome; it just impacts how and how quickly you reach that outcome.

Before hyperautomation, IT would deliver automation projects. However, demand for automation has come to exceed development bandwidth.

In the age of hyperautomation, businesses must carefully consider who is doing the automation and how their work gets plugged into other systems. For example, IT used to develop an app to onboard a new customer across systems; hyperautomation enables someone much closer to the business problem to build that themselves. It produces a better solution in less time and there is no IT backlog.

Imagine a future where everyone can automate. Express it once, and it is automatically done as many times as required. In that world, creativity will be the only currency that trades. Organizations that position themselves to take advantage of that future will thrive in unprecedented geometric ways. Ideas have always been the real battleground and technologies like hyperautomation squelch the IT noise from the creative signal. This is a powerful combination of a common fabric to express our intent and the leverage our data for future decisioning.

Discretion will play a key role in the future of hyperautomation

With hyperautomation we can easily automate monotonous tasks, but what about automating complex decisions that require discretion? What about decisions where the outcome makes or breaks a customer interaction? For example, a police officer has the discretion to escort you to the hospital during a medical emergency as opposed to issuing you a ticket.

Human-controlled AI puts the predictive power of machine learning on the same playing field as ordering something online. However, computers don’t know what is best, they can only make predictions. And for those who had their outdoor wedding ruined by thunderstorms, predictions ARE just a guess. By integrating human control, hyperautomation can automate reasoning and still reflect us, as we are, as people. However, as we automate at higher and higher levels, the costs of mistakes will go up. With great power comes great responsibility.

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Comments

  1. It’s a good read. Pretty informative! But is there an answer to my doubt on whether Hyperautomation will ever be able to quarantine bugs.. Indeed, I agree we can accelerate the development process, can we hyperautomate quality testing as well?