Being at the forefront of technological innovation is essential to remain competitive in an ever-changing business environment. With AI as your co-pilot, you have the power to not only improve operational efficiency but also bridge the gap between how companies envision processes being performed and how they actually operate. AI can resolve these discrepancies by providing deeper insights into technology utilization, workforce proficiency, and identifying productivity bottlenecks, ensuring operations not only meet but exceed improvement plans. Strategic alignment between intended and actual processes not only prepares your organization for the future, but also significantly improves operational performance and bottom line results.
According to a recent McKinsey report on AI in 2023, the integration of generative AI (GenAI) across industries is expected to generate $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion in economic value. This highlights the immense potential of AI to reshape business strategies and execution methodologies. The notion of AI as a co-pilot is not just a futuristic concept but a reality that will reshape the very fabric of business operations.
Vice President of Product Management at Skan.
AI Copilot: Unlocking talent insights for future-ready organizations
AI, especially generative AI (GenAI), goes beyond simple automation to enhance operations and empower employees. GenAI-powered process intelligence identifies opportunities for automation and innovation, generates solutions to complex problems, and predicts challenges. This approach makes the relationship between technology and employees more dynamic. GenAI-powered process intelligence platforms analyze user behavior to guide decisions, improve productivity, and enable proactive improvements and innovative problem solving. These AI co-pilots act as digital efficiency experts, analyzing user behavior to identify strengths, weaknesses, and bottlenecks. This data helps leaders make informed decisions, customize training, and optimize workflows to improve organizational efficiency and keep organizations running smoothly.
Let's see this concept in action: Organizations are leveraging AI to collect business process data by continuously observing work, create effective process maps, and discover hidden productivity potential among employees. Companies can streamline processes and improve efficiency by identifying bottlenecks and maximizing output. This results in significant cost savings, cuts cumbersome redundancies, and enables organizations to run leaner and more effective.
AI, especially when integrated with process and task mining, revolutionizes operational optimization by capturing processes in real-time and providing insights for efficiency improvements. This convergence of technologies gives companies an unparalleled view into the minutiae of their operations, facilitating not just observation but actionable changes. GenAI takes this even further by not only digesting large volumes of process intelligence data to provide actionable insights, but also guiding decision-making based on these insights and dynamically optimizing end-to-end processes to adapt to changes as they occur. This level of operational intelligence enables precise, dynamic interventions that significantly reduce inefficiencies and improve productivity. Additionally, scenario modeling allows companies to conduct “what-if” analyses, fostering a proactive organizational culture and helping leaders drive sustainable growth.
AI-driven process simulation plays a key role in identifying optimal paths and simulating process flows, enhancing decision-making, streamlining operations, driving continuous improvement, and augmenting rather than replacing human insight.
How Process Intelligence Accelerates Business in Real Time
Process Intelligence gives businesses real-time visibility into their operations, much like a smartwatch tracks your health. This tool is essential for empowering your workforce with AI. Moreover, its success relies on four key pillars that help businesses address key challenges and achieve accurate, data-driven results:
1. Optimizing processes for operational efficiency: Process intelligence analyzes the entire value chain, enabling leaders to identify effective practices, automation opportunities, and set performance benchmarks.
2. Intelligent automation: AI-powered process intelligence drives effective automation, streamlining operations and freeing up resources to deliver significant cost savings and improve profitability.
3. Workplace Productivity: Process intelligence bridges the gap between goals and execution, providing insight into workforce utilization and workflow bottlenecks, resulting in significant productivity gains.
4. Prepare for the future of work: As automation increases, process intelligence identifies tasks to automate and key human roles, allowing companies to upskill their workforce and stay competitive.
Always-on insights for continuous improvement
Many businesses struggle to bring innovative ideas to life because they lack the data to support them. AI eliminates this “insight delay” by providing instant access to actionable information. Here's an example: Imagine an insurance company looking to improve customer satisfaction by reducing service desk response times. Traditionally, they would have had to dig into historical data to identify bottlenecks. But with process intelligence, they can get instant insights into processing times, error rates, and even employee training needs. This allows them to take immediate action and optimize their service desk operations.
A responsible and safe AI co-pilot
While AI offers many transformative benefits, it also raises concerns about data security, making privacy-first architectures essential and embedding data protection principles into AI system design from the outset to prevent catastrophic data leaks.
Process intelligence technology helps companies optimize operations and protect employee data while complying with strict regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The technology focuses on relevant process improvement data points, prevents unnecessary data collection, and ensures privacy and compliance.
It is important to reiterate that the role of AI is not to replace jobs, but to be a powerful augmentation tool that enhances and amplifies human capabilities. That said, the ethical use of AI relies on transparency. All employees should understand how and why their data is used. Process Intelligence enhances privacy and builds trust by focusing on improving organizational workflows and aggregating data with employee privacy as a priority. Needless to say, employees can opt out of analysis altogether. If necessary, works councils or unions can be given access to anonymized insights, further promoting transparency.
Beyond Big Wins: The Power of Incremental Change
AI serves as a key catalyst for continuous organizational improvement, especially through its ability to continuously learn and adapt. By identifying “marginal gains” that traditional approaches fail to realize, AI creates a culture of continuous improvement, turning small tweaks into big operational advancements. AI insights lead to continuous enhancements, not one-off fixes. In other words, it’s like having real-time access to an ever-evolving guide that constantly learns and optimizes your operations. GenAI enhances this further by not only highlighting areas for improvement, but also suggesting innovative solutions and doing some of the work itself, surpassing the capabilities of traditional process or task mining tools. This approach enables organizations to maintain a lasting advantage in efficiency and productivity.
The era of AI as our co-pilot will transform the way businesses approach operations, workforce management, and strategic decision-making. Leveraging the power of AI, organizations can future-proof their operations, maximize efficiency, and drive sustainable growth. As businesses pave the way, the possibilities are endless and the future will be AI-driven. With AI continuing to act as our co-pilot, we are on the path to innovation, optimization, and unparalleled success.
We featured the best of business intelligence.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel, featuring the best and brightest minds in technology today. Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you're interested in contributing, find out more here. https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro
