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Automation technologies, AI, and robotics are critical CIO targets

The adoption of automation technologies like artificial intelligence and robotic process automation is key to driving business efforts.
Written by Forrester Research, Contributor

Must read: Download Forrester's complimentary guide on how to manage the automation portfolio to out-think your competition.   

To stay ahead, CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and other executives integrating leading-edge technologies into their companies' operations and business models must turn their attention to automation technologies, including intelligent machines, robotic process automation (RPA) bots, artificial intelligence, and physical robotics. Automation encompasses a diverse set of technologies that run the gamut from sensing (gathering and evaluating data to determine when and why to act) to adapting (determining how to act, then sequencing and executing tasks); true automation requires both types of activities.

Also: Automation will become central to business strategy 

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Full Automation Requires Both The Sense And Adapt Phases Of Technology

Automation continues to gain new prominence as it transforms a wider array of business processes than ever before. It's reshaping jobs and how we perform them. It's altering the operations that underpin customer experience, helping us to design, produce, distribute, and support products and services far more effectively. It's directly improving customer experiences, allowing companies to employ solutions like personalization -- at scale -- for the first time.

CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and other leaders driving technology innovation should keep in mind the wide-ranging impact automation technologies will have on their businesses. These include examples like:

  • AI-enhanced RPA. AI is only one dimension of automation, which also includes many sub-AI-level algorithms and tools. But increasingly, AI suffuses and boosts many different automation technologies -- or will do so in the near future. For example, while RPA is creating a lot of operational value today, its future lies in cognitive-AI enhancement, a technology convergence that will solve many more business problems and will do so in a more sophisticated fashion.
  • Software-defined infrastructure. Automation starts deep inside a company's infrastructure; in fact, the modern CIO's infrastructure is now largely based on software. Infrastructure-as-code, including containers, has become the new foundation of modern enterprise infrastructures.
  • Marketing automation. Automation isn't just a phenomenon of infrastructure or back-end processes. Marketing automation is reshaping the very basis of how firms communicate with customers and prospects. For example, AI vendor Persado's marketing technology leverages big data and AI to determine whether specific words and phrases will resonate with prospective customers, conducting large-scale, multifaceted A/B tests to inform these decisions.
  • Computer vision. Automation will increasingly cross the physical-digital divide. One battery manufacturer traditionally used human inspectors to determine whether batteries passed quality assurance tests. The company started with a 2D solution, but later migrated to a fully automated solution using 3D cameras and sophisticated software. Doing so drove new levels of success -- a nearly 100-percent fault detection and elimination of the 2D solution's 8% to 10% false rejection rate.
  • Physical robotics. And physical robots are finally becoming genuine drivers of business value outside of the automotive industry. Retail and warehouse robotics -- which Amazon brought to prominence with its acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012 -- is reshaping how firms deliver products through retail and eCommerce. Companies like Fetch Robotics and Geek+ are driving a new wave of business process reengineering, helping Amazon's competitors reshape warehousing and logistics.

Also; How to automate your business: 3 critical steps TechRepublic

To capitalize on the automation revolution, CIOs must make critical investments. By raising the importance of automation as a discipline within the organization, CIOs can turn automation into a strategic competency -- and a source of business model differentiation.

This post originally appeared here

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