Age of Invisible Machines

CHAPTER 3Competing in the Age of Hyperautomation

Plenty of organizations will be tempted to put off hyperautomation, thinking they don't have the resources for an undertaking that seems so extensive and volatile. But the bottom line is that avoiding the inevitable widespread adoption of hyperautomation puts a company at risk of losing market share. Meanwhile, companies that successfully achieve and maintain hyperautomation put themselves in a league beyond even their nearest competitors.

“Hyperautomation has shifted from an option to a condition of survival,” Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at Gartner, said in 2021. “Organizations will require more IT and business process automation as they are forced to accelerate digital transformation plans in a post-COVID-19, digital-first world.”[1]

Companies that are hyperautomating are not only accomplishing more with less, it's also easier for them to further automate new and more sophisticated processes and tasks. This scenario sets off a force multiplier that sends them on a path toward operational superiority. When companies find their stride with hyperautomation, it becomes exponentially harder for their competitors to reach them.

What Successful Hyperautomation Can Look Like

As a company expands and evolves its ecosystem, it's able to automate more and more tasks of greater and greater complexity. This increasingly frees people's time to work on more creative endeavors, such as problem solving and automating additional ...