One principle for successful A.I. enabled automation

It’s no secret that the past two years have changed a lot in the global economy. You’d be hard pressed to find a business that hasn’t had to adapt drastically in order to survive, compete, and thrive.

Perhaps the most obvious evidence of this is the acceleration of digital transformation strategies, which is driven by a range of demands – like shifting consumer expectations, hybrid working, and maintaining productivity throughout uncertainty.

Adopting A.I. enabled process automation has been key in meeting these demands, but finding, attracting and retaining people with the right skills and experience to do so is incredibly challenging.

In our experience, whether you’ll succeed or fail at this depends massively on your company’s culture. This impacts everything from the purpose that drives your people, to the way they think, how they behave, and the decisions they make on a daily basis.

How vital is company culture?

It’s pretty hard to overstate the importance of culture, especially when you’re aiming to bring in new and potentially transformative technologies – as well as the people needed to use, run, and maintain them.

According to a survey by Eagle Hill Consulting:

77% of employees say a strongly engaged culture makes them do their best at work,

76% have experienced improvements in their productivity and efficiency, and

67% believe it increases their innovation and creativity.

These are very welcomed gains. We’d even go as far as to say that performance, productivity, and innovation are essential in implementing A.I. enabled process automation.

So whether you’re looking at an off-the-shelf solution or custom build, what culture should you build to maximise your chance of success?

Let’s explore what’s worked incredibly well for us for the past 20 years.

One culture principle to live by

Building a new culture is a difficult pursuit, and one that doesn’t happen overnight. It might take you years, and will no doubt require a whole lot of fine tuning, but the success of your digital transformation depends on it.

We believe this so strongly that we built our entire business with a culture-first mindset. This makes Intelygenz a rewarding place to work, helping us to attract and retain the best talent in tech, business, and data.

At the heart of this culture is a single principle that underpins everything we do. A principle that we believe any business should incorporate if they want to succeed with technologies such as A.I. enabled process automation.

This principle is experimentation.

Never stop experimenting

Tech never stops moving. So if you settle on a single set of methodologies, processes, or tools, you’ll very quickly fall behind. Experimentation is the key to keeping your approach fresh and results high. Play around with the technology you have, find new ways to use it, drop tools that aren’t adding value, and try new things as much as possible.

By continually asking questions, testing theories and conducting research, we’ve not only avoided stagnation, but also achieved exponential efficiency in our projects. That’s because the more we experiment, the more we learn, improve, and find ways to reduce time to value for our clients.

If you decide to make experimentation a key part of your culture, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Apply experimentation in a collaborative way – it’s no use making new discoveries in silos, or never using learnings to inform future projects. Knowledge should be shared regularly across functions within your organisation.
• Contribute to and utilise open source – technology moves fast because developers share with the wider community. Be proactive in taking part.
• Communicate this principle clearly – This will attract the right people when you’re hiring, and retain those who already share your commitment to experimentation.
• Dedicate time and resources – Your people are busy with their daily duties, so make a point of setting aside frequent time and resources that gives them the freedom to experiment.

Creating value inside and out

If you follow these tips, you’ll be able to use experimentation as the driving force in your own company culture, and maximize the chances that your tech adoption will be a success. It works because experimentation creates value both inside and outside of your organization – giving employees the opportunity to personally develop, and improving the quality and output speed you can achieve for customers and clients.

A great example of this is what we’ve achieved with our very own proprietary tool for internal collaboration. Powered by our commitment to shared experimentation, Konstellation contains over 30,000 academic ML models from the open source community and our own Data Science team. We use this to manage our workflows and automate the engineering process for launching our solutions into production.

This enables our multi-disciplinary team to work together at speed, ensures corporate knowledge is retained, and reduces the time taken to deploy our solutions into production environments where they start to create real business value.

Over to you…

So, if adopting A.I. enabled automation is on your radar for the future, consider encouraging your people to experiment and give your business the best chance of success. 

Remember – the recruitment landscape is incredibly competitive when it comes to attracting the talent you’ll need. But if you do manage to secure the right people, give them the freedom to learn, develop and collaborate, and you’ll not only retain them, but also maximise the value you create with your shiny new tech.