Articles about Automation

If you’re a college student and you’ve placed an online food service order, and let’s be honest, that pretty much covers all college students; the chances are high that the delivery was aided and abetted by robot technology. The future has arrived, and even though we’re still waiting for those Jetson’s-promised flying cars, robot foodservice delivery is here.

Robots numbering in the hundreds are buzzing about college campuses and some selected cities in the U.S., U.K., and beyond. The testing, which began pre-pandemic, went into immediate overdrive to fill in the gaps created by the labor shortages and need for social distancing created by Covid-19.

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New research from service orchestration and automation solutions company Stonebranch finds 88 percent of enterprises intend to grow their investment in these technologies this year.

The report is based on a survey of respondents from companies with over 1000 employees to find their views about automation and orchestration as it relates to cloud, data pipelines, IT operations, self-service enablement, and more.

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Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been around longer than you might realize. At its core, RPA simply means the automation of any manually intensive IT or administrative task. For instance, scheduling an email is one early example of RPA. But over the last two years, RPA has become much easier to use and the tools have been democratized out to the business units so arduous daily tasks may now be automated easily. Think of it as a highly evolved Excel macro, created by someone in the business that automatically logs into and out of applications to make the enterprise more effective and efficient.

What's more, due to the lack of resources available, automating enterprise processes traditionally caused friction between business units and IT. Today, IT teams may focus on large, transformative automation (e.g., new ERP Systems, new services) and push everything else back over to other business units. Transforming an organization by allowing business units to accomplish more on their own -- while freeing up IT to focus on more complex and important tasks is a far more effective use of all resources. 

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According to a new study from integration and API specialist MuleSoft 70 percent of organizations struggle to provide completely connected user experiences across all channels.

This is despite the fact that almost three-quarters (72 percent) of organizations' customer interactions are now digital.

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We none of us particularly like handing over money, and that applies equally to businesses and individuals.

Payments are essential to the commercial world, up to now though they've always been a quite labor intensive to process. But what if it could be automated? Would you feel comfortable handing over control of payments to AI?

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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many enterprises turned their attention to digital transformation projects. But a talent shortage has held things back, leading many to consider automation as a way to alleviate the burden today's organizations are experiencing.

We spoke to Charlie Newark-French, chief operating officer of human centered automation company Hyperscience, to find out more about the balance between humanity and AI, automation's role in the digital enterprise, and automation's role in digital transformation.

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Customer service bots, digital payroll workflows, fleet management and lest we forget the clever programmer who famously automated his own job -- the uses for and adoption of automation continues to expand. In fact, the automation market is expected to reach $136.5 billion by 2026 with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.7 percent according to Industry ARC’s Automation Market Report.

But as growth and excitement build, confusion in the market also abounds. After all, the word "automation" is so overused and broad that it’s no longer descriptive.

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Pretty much any business workflow can be automated, but which ones do enterprise executives say are the most important and deliver the greatest value?

A new report from automation specialist Kofax shows that tasks relating to financial transactions top most lists, with accounts payable automation top on 85 percent.

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In today’s fast-paced, data-driven environment, the only constant that businesses can bank on is change. For organizations to function and compete in the modern digital landscape, they need their data to be able to move freely and unobstructed through every branch of their business, unimpeded by security issues that require constant manual attention.

The network is arguably the beating heart of an organization but keeping it ticking requires more maintenance than it once did, owing to constantly changing risk profiles and circumstances. That’s why a greater number of businesses are turning to change automation to bridge the gap between network alerts and the action that needs to be taken.

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Within the next two years one in five workers will be remote and more than half will be in hybrid environment according to a new report.

However, digital employee experience (DEX) specialist 1E and Forrester Consulting have released data that shows only 34 percent of organizations can currently support their future hybrid and remote work needs.

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It's well known that security teams are suffering from alert overload and new research from Invicti Security shows that false positives and the need for manual verification are serious problems.

Analysis of six years' worth of real-world vulnerability data shows enterprise security teams are spending nearly 10,000 hours a year checking unreliable vulnerability reports, and this could cost as much as half a million dollars annually.

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A new study carried out by Opinium for certificate authority GlobalSign shows that managing digital certificates, especially expirations and renewals, continues to be a challenging process for businesses of all sizes.

The top challenges respondents typically encountered when keeping track of certificates include managing multiple types of certificates (45 percent) and managing large quantities of them (41 percent).

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A new report shows that 70 percent of automation initiatives are being hindered by security concerns and data silos, as organizations increasingly look to automation to improve efficiency and productivity.

The IT and Business Alignment Barometer from MuleSoft does offer some hope though as it shows companies can overcome these challenges and enable faster innovation across their organizations if IT and business teams work closely together.

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Home automation continues to grow in popularity at an ever-increasing rate. The market value is expected to reach $114 billion by 2025, with smart lighting products accounting for 25 percent of that.

It’s hard to say where the average user begins with home automation, but we’d argue it’s likely to be with a smart lightbulb for most of them. It’s a product that seems straightforward and doesn’t have the dangers of locking you out of your house (as a smart lock could) or making you feel like you’re either in a) Death Valley, or b) Nome, Alaska (unlike a smart thermostat). 

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Workers in IT, HR, finance and other roles welcome the use of tools that automate processes and improve productivity -- but many are concerned automation might someday make their jobs less relevant.

A study by Thirdera, specialist in services for ServiceNow users, finds 83 percent of workers are using AI-powered search, chatbots, self-service portals, mobile apps, AIOps, business intelligence and dynamic scheduling tools every day, and 46 percent have been doing so for at least a year.

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