Yes, you’ve probably heard about automation and how automating processes can positively impact a company’s workflows, and even increase revenue by high percentages. But what about hyperautomation? Lately, this term has been thrown a lot across the internet, with promises of high revenue increases and ease of processes. Keep scrolling and find out what hyperautomation means and how businesses across different industries can benefit from it.
What is Hyperautomation?
“Automation” means the process of automatizing something; “hyperautomation” is the same but with different, recently developed tools, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Companies have been automating processes and workflows for decades now — at first, through time-consuming processes where the staff was key. After that, with big data and other techniques — but hyperautomation takes all this to the next level.
A Markets and Markets report predicts that the hyperautomation market is set to increase from 9.2 billion USD in 2022 to 26 billion USD in 2027, growing at an annual rate of 23%. The same document states that most of this growth will happen thanks to the technological advancements in China, Japan, and India.
This is probably the most important area of supply chain management. Logistics staff and processes are responsible for ensuring that the supply and demand ratio is being met, that the goods are being sent and delivered to customers, and so on. Having someone — in this case, something — not only ease these processes through automatization but even finding new, better ones, would be amazing. That’s where hyperautomation comes in: it can increase productivity and customer experience, and help reduce costs. According to a PreScouter article from last year, the logistics sector is expected to “fully adopt” hyperautomation within three years.
Basically, most of the tiresome and time-consuming tasks in a company’s logistics department can be enhanced with these new techniques. A meat processing company can use artificial intelligence and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to gather useful information about consumer trends and come up with solutions focused on increasing efficiency, and meeting the consumers’ needs. Blockchain can then be used to set certain tasks automatically, therefore decreasing the number of steps needed to finish said tasks.
The traditional job of a company’s claims officer entails collecting data from customers, cataloging it, analyzing the claims one by one, determining a course of action, and making a decision. Using hyperautomation could allow this employer to focus on other things. How? Digitally received claims could be analyzed by trained chatbots via NLP, which would merge with AI to find proper ways to reply and solutions to the customers’ issues. Human intervention would only be needed to set up the process. After that, everything would be automatized and autonomous, allowing employees to focus on other things.
Logistics isn’t exclusive to supermarkets or meat processing companies; it’s essential to many industries, from healthcare to the automotive sector, which means hyperautomation can have a major impact a bit everywhere. Inter Aduaneira is an interesting case study. The Brazilian international trade consultancy was able to save around 800 hours per analyst. Read the article about it here.
Finance is an important and relevant area for every business and industry as well. Who wouldn’t want finance processes to be bettered and more functional? Hyperautomation can help CFOs and CEOs achieve that. Tasks like closing books and running models can be done by machines. Setting things to happen automatically and autonomously saves time, and money, and decreases the margin for (human) error. Using blockchain and AI to automatize processes, enables leaders to better allocate their staff’s time and expertise but also helps avoid future mistakes by setting processes to run with algorithms.
Gartner says the cost of finance will drop 40% in the coming years: “Autonomous is really that predictive and prescriptive nature where decisions are being made based on a constant stream of data — not just you picking up some technology to save time and make something more efficient”, said Alexander Bant, the company’s Chief of Research for Finance. Bant believes mindset change plays a big role in accepting and even embracing these new tools — he argues organizations will have to “rethink the way work is done”.
Logistics and finance are vital areas for almost every business, so it might be fair to say that hyperautomation can — and will — be useful for several industries, from healthcare (pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies can establish automatized processes so chronic patients — whose medical histories are stored in the blockchain — receive their prescriptions at home) to automotive, energy to banking, telecommunications, IT, manufacturing, insurance, legal, and so on.
Challenges in Hyperautomation Adoption
Cybersecurity — Hyperautomation requires digitizing countless processes, and storing them somewhere — usually shared servers or an online cloud. If data isn’t properly safeguarded, it can be exposed to potential cyber-attacks.
Legacy systems — Some systems currently in use might not always be compatible with newer ones, therefore creating the need to adapt, and find ways to transport all the data and necessary software to the future systems. It might be time-consuming and costly to implement.
Privacy — Technology that fosters automation runs on data, which in turn has to be harvested from the real world. This means using people’s — customers, workers, etc — personal information. Privacy issues can arise and should be addressed. Companies should have strict compliance policies to adhere to these new technologies and correctly implement hyperautomation.
Error & Bias — Machine learning systems and AI go a long way when it comes to hard data (quantitative) like analyzing numbers, developing useful algorithms, and crafting reports, but they can also be wrong when it comes to soft (qualitative) data. Chatbots can retrieve information from a chat room or a complaints page on a website, analyze, and provide you with the number of the same complaints, and other useful data, but they might not be able to find different solutions for issues that might sound the same, or even contextualize. They’ll need humans to help with that, so supervision, audits, and detection of errors are paramount to make this work.
In conclusion, hyperautomation can — and will probably — become a leading trend across several industries, especially with the rising use of blockchain, AI, and other technologies. Companies and brand should be aware of the risks, but also start preparing for implementation as a strategy to be ahead of their competitors and not left behind.
Integritee is the most scalable, privacy-enabling network with a Parachain on Kusama and Polkadot. Our SDK solution combines the security and trust of Polkadot, the scalability of second-layer Sidechains, and the confidentiality of Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), special-purpose hardware based on Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology inside which computations run securely, confidentially, and verifiably.
Community & Social Media:
Join Integritee on Discord | Telegram | Twitter | Medium | Youtube | LinkedIn | Website
Products:
L2 Sidechains | Trusted Off-chain Workers | Teeracle | Attesteer | Securitee | Incognitee
Integritee Network:
Governance | Explorer | Mainnet | Github
TEERdays: A New Unit That Will Shape Incognitee
Common European Data Spaces: Fostering Data Innovation & Collaboration in the EU
How Biometric Data Collection Can Be Dangerous — Even When Built With Blockchain
Monthly Wrap-Up July 2024: Talking at Decoded, Launching Treasury Proposals, Publishing Articles & More
Cybercrime on the Rise: Why Is Securing OT Systems Paramount?
Monthly Wrap-Up June 2024: Incognitee Bug Bounty Launch, Polkadot Treasury Proposal & More
Become a Collator Operator for Integritee Network!
MiCA & Other Crypto-Related Regulations: Striking the Right Balance
DEXs on Polkadot: Leveraging the Power of Substrate & Shared Security
Slot Auctions vs Coretime: What’s Changing for Polkadot Projects
Monthly Wrap-Up March 2024: Listing TEER on Basilisk, Attending Sub0 & Paseo Landing
DEXs: The What, The Why & The How of Decentralized Exchanges
Monthly Wrap-Up February 2024: Crowdloan, Governance and Treasury
Monthly Wrap-Up January 2024: Launching the Incognitee Testnet, Winning a Hackernoon Award & Much More!
Polkadot Crowdloan: Campaign Kicks Off on February 7th!
2023 at Integritee: Product Releases, Partnerships, a Privacy Sidechain & Much More
OLI Systems Releases Research Paper about a DLT-Based Local Energy Market Model
Monthly Wrap-Up December 2023: New Products, Fresh Content & More
2023 Integritee Content: Giving Back to Our Community
Unlocking Privacy in Transfers: The Power of Integritee’s Private Sidechain Model
Monthly Wrap-Up November 2023: New Content, TEER Recover & Tech Updates
Monthly Wrap-Up October 2023: Joining an Accelerator Program, Launching the New Website, Educational Content & More!
Monthly Wrap-Up September 2023: Winning an Award, Talking at Sub0, Partnering with OVH & More!
OVH Releases Whitepaper on How Integritee Is Re-Inventing Blockchain Security & Confidentiality Using Intel SGX Technology & OVHcloud
Monthly Wrap-Up August 2023: Launching the Attesteer, Encointer’s PoP Badge & More
Launching Integritee’s Attesteer
Monthly Wrap-Up July 2023: Video Releases, Tech Updates & More
Monthly Wrap-Up June 2023: Polkadot Decoded, New Add-Ons and More
Monthly Wrap-Up May 2023: Governance Platform Launch, New Environments and More
Integritee Launches New Governance Platform with Polkassembly
Monthly Wrap-Up April 2023: Tech Upgrades, Partnerships & Upcoming News
Monthly Wrap-Up March 2023: Product Releases, a Privacy Sidechain & More
Securitee & enclaive Team Up to Offer Ready-To-Use TEE-Secured Solutions
Securitee Launches Confidential Computing Platform to Protect Data in Use
Introducing Integritee’s Teeracle: A Framework to Build TEE-Based Oracles
A Privacy Sidechain for All Polkadot & Kusama Chains
Monthly Wrap-Up February 2023: Launching Roadmap, Partnerships and More!
SDK v0.11.0: Increased Performance and Faster Processes
OLI Systems Develops Innovative Energy Market Place by Building on Integritee
Integritee Network: Roadmap 2023
Monthly Wrap-Up January 2023: Slot Swap, Davos Touchdown and Much More
Community Updates: Discord, Twitter Raids & More
2022 at Integritee: Winning Parachains, Hosting Events, Integrating with Projects & Much More
Monthly Wrap-Up November 2022: Lisbon Happenings, Bifrost Integration & More
XCM Integration of Integritee and Bifrost Completed
Integritee Welcomes Sergei Medvedev as New Advisory Board Member
Monthly Wrap-Up October 2022: Travels, Interviews, Tech Updates & More
Monthly Wrap-Up September 2022: Integritee SDK Release, Token2049 & More
Integritee & Securitee: Connecting the Dots
Integritee’s SDK: A New Era of Web3 Application Building
Monthly Wrap-Up August 2022
Integritee Sidechain Performance Benchmark
Integritee & Crust Team Up for Publicly Verifiable Decentralized Content Storage
Integritee’s Polkadot Crowdloan
Monthly Wrap-Up July 2022: Winning a Slot on Polkadot, Integrating with Karura & Much More
From Web 2.0 to Web3: A Step Forward
Polkadot: The Next Step in Integritee’s Growth and Development
Integritee Rewards Structure: Early Birds, Loyal Followers, Family, Friends, and More!
The Integritee Polkadot Crowdloan Campaign Starts Today!
XCM Integration: What Is It and How Does It Work?
Monthly Wrap-Up June 2022: Kraken listing, Talking at Polkadot Decoded & More!
XCM integration of Integritee & Moonriver Completed