Generative AI is just one part of a growing trend towards the automation of business processes.
The use of generative AI in business processes grew by 400% in 2023, and the biggest adopters were RevOps (48% of use cases) followed by IT (31%). Perhaps surprisingly, customer support lagged behind at 12%.
Highly complex automation cases have almost doubled over the past two years, while 50% of automation cases stretch over four or more departments. The findings come from the “2024 Work Automation Index” released this week by work automation platform Workato.
More key findings. Based on a survey of more than 1,000 medium-size and enterprise Workato clients, the report found automation being promoted both by economic headwinds and the constraints they impose, and by the growth of generative AI.
- Operations roles are at the forefront of automating processes. Business operations teams automated 27.7% of all processes in 2023.
- Automated processes are becoming more complex, involving more apps and more steps.
- While 56% of automations are still built by IT, it also plays coach on the 44% built by other business teams.
- 11% of automations still keep humans in the loop, for example for approvals.
Why we care. A perfect storm here from the convergence of two separate but complementary trends. First, the trend towards the automated enterprise — admittedly at the likely expense of certain kinds of manual jobs. It’s a trend Workato CEO Vijay Tella described in his 2023 book “The New Automation Mindset.”
That trend is independent of generative AI. In other words, automation of as many manual business processes as possible would be happening if ChatGPT and similar tools had not made generative AI accessible outside the enterprise. But of course genAI, with its capability of actually constructing (even coding) business processes in response to natural language prompts, is greatly accelerating automation.
For marketers, it’s intriging to see RevOps leading the way on genAI.
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MarTechAbout the author
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.
Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
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