IBM’s current focal point in AI research and development lies in applying it to technology operations. As Ball explained, “As people try to build applications out in the world, it’s an increasingly complex situation. There are so many tools, there are so many environments that go into building and maintaining an application over time that a lot of teams are just drowned under all of the data that’s involved.”

To tackle this challenge, the company has announced IBM Concert, which will harness AI to make sense of the vast amount of data involved in application development and maintenance. “It’s using AI to figure out actually how your application works, and then provides recommendations about how to make it better,” Ball said.

Upcoming AI opportunities

According to Ball, a current opportunity is organising the unstructured data that feeds into AI models. “There can be a gap between the unstructured amoeba of data and then what you want in AI, which is sorted, ready to go,” he acknowledged. However, IBM is actively working to bridge this gap, with IBM Concert set to evolve and incorporate tools to organise data into a format more digestible for AI engines.

Explainability is another critical aspect of AI that IBM is addressing with IBM Concert. Ball emphasised the importance of not blindly accepting AI recommendations, stating, “We’re actually building in a function that you can question the recommendation so that you can question what the AI comes up with, and sort of dig a little bit deeper into how it came to that conclusion.”

Powering the future of work

Beyond IBM Concert, IBM offers a suite of AI technologies and tools, such as watsonx and AI governance solutions. As Ball explained, IBM aims to provide a “use-case-neutral” approach, allowing customers to leverage IBM’s AI capabilities for their specific needs.

One area where IBM has seen early success with IBM Concert is in addressing the data overload faced by many organisations. Ball shared that design partners have been “amazed at what we’re able to do, the insights that we’re able to show, even at a very basic level.” As IBM Concert’s capabilities continue to evolve, IBM expects to deliver even more profound insights and conclusions, ultimately improving application performance, security, and overall management.

For organisations considering adopting AI for the first time, Ball’s advice is clear: “Be deliberate about what you want to do with it. Don’t come in just thinking that the technology itself is the goal, but have a real use case in mind, a real goal in mind that you want AI to accomplish.”

At the upcoming Intelligent Automation Conference, where IBM is a key sponsor, the company plans to showcase IBM Concert and its potential to transform technology operations through the power of AI.

As the interview concluded, Ball expressed excitement about the possibilities of IBM Concert, stating, “We’re really excited about this, and we think our customers are going to be really excited about it too.”

You can watch our full interview with Ben Ball below:

Gain further insights from Ben Ball as he shares his expertise in his day one presentation titled ‘Leveraging Gen AI to proactively mitigate security vulnerabilities in your applications’ at the Intelligent Automation Conference.

Want to learn more about intelligent automation from industry leaders? Check out the Intelligent Automation Conference taking place in California, London, and Amsterdam. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including AI & Big Data Expo, IoT Tech Expo, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

The post Ben Ball, IBM: Revolutionising technology operations with IBM Concert appeared first on AI News.

A study from SS&C Blue Prism, conducted by Forrester Consulting and published in April, put together a composite organisation representative of five customers interviewed. The conclusion was that, over three years, there were key gains in IA from greater productivity to compliance cost avoidance, to improved employee experience and retention. This represented an overall net present value of $53.4 million (£42.5m) per customer.

Yet this may just be the tip of the iceberg. Dan Segura, enterprise sales manager at SS&C Blue Prism, notes one healthcare client who, in what is described as a conservative estimate, delivered savings of more than $140m overall on cost avoidance and recoup. Another healthcare client delivered a use case with a claimed $43m benefit on its own; a bot which recouped overtime pay for nurses and staff during the pandemic.

“They built it in an afternoon,” Segura explains. “It’s a perfect example of being in the right place at the right time; and having the right skills and technology being ready.”

Many of the technologies which comprise intelligent automation have been around for a long time, such as classic RPA (robotic process automation) or OCR (optical character recognition). SS&C Blue Prism’s document automation, which forms part of the latter, is described as a ‘game-changer’ by Segura. “There’s a lot of these processes, whether it’s going to be executed by a robot or a human,” he says. “First things first, we’ve got to get data off documents.

“Automation is not just doing simple tasks anymore thanks to the introduction of AI and generative AI” he adds. “There’s now more understanding, whether it’s assessing information from documents, information from a message, structuring things that are semi-structured or unstructured, to drive the process or complete the process.”

Segura describes wider business process management (BPM) and process orchestration tool Chorus, meanwhile, as ‘one of the world’s best kept secrets.’ Or, at least, it was; in November analyst Everest Group named the tool as a leader and star performer in its Process Orchestration Products PEAK Matrix.

The tool is now getting leverage outside the traditional finance and insurance fields. “It is how millions and millions of transactions and pieces of work are getting done every day,” says Segura. “We’re now seeing adoption [elsewhere] alongside automation to orchestrate their work and give them that end-to-end work orchestration, visibility, and efficiency gains with whatever they have going on.”

So how does a use case come to life? It is often a mixture of inspiration and perspiration. Where SS&C Blue Prism comes in is to ‘help customers catch lightning’, as Segura puts it. “We’ve all been in that situation where it’s like ‘oh if I were running this place, here’s what I would do’,” he says. “Intelligent automation gives you the opportunity to reimagine your processes and transform how you get work done. Once that light switch turns on, and the initial use case is built, that’s really the secret sauce of SS&C Blue Prism; it’s that realisation and awareness of what intelligent automation can deliver.

“We’re always learning from our customers,” adds Segura. “It’s at their direction because they know their business and processes better than anybody. Combine their business expertise with the transformational power of intelligent automation and its digital workforce, then that’s where the magic happens.”

Any organisation, argues Segura, regardless of the industry, has change agents and citizen builders in waiting. Don’t think that’s a misnomer; the term is definitely ‘builder’.

“I hear about these citizen developer programmes, and they’ll say, ‘here we have 500, 1000 citizen developers.’ What I don’t hear is, ‘and with this army of citizen developers we’ve achieved this’,” says Segura. “Whereas I have customers where two people have basically become citizen builders with more of a robust type of approach.” The $43m healthcare single use case is a case in point. “It is the whole mantra of SS&C Blue Prism,” adds Segura. “We’re designed to go after those higher value chain automations that can have a tangible impact on some of the company’s key objectives.”

So, you have the idea, the value proposition, and the capability to build it out. How do you make it stick?  Every organisation is different; though if your company has a continuous process improvement department then that can be a good place to start. Segura likens it to offshoring processes. “You don’t just wave it goodbye and never think about it again,” he explains. “At the end of the day, it still has to function.

“You’re not just ‘digital-shoring’ [automation] and it will essentially be taken care of by digital. Someone has to continuously improve the process; someone has to mind when something changes with the business rules or regulatory compliance; somebody has to be responsible for making sure that those changes are kept up in an agile way.”

SS&C Blue Prism has a longstanding, large US retail customer that combines that lightning capture with the right internal culture around automation. This is a company that has 72,000 employees, as well as 60 ‘digital workers’ executing more than 150 automations. One such automation, through using OCR technology, lets the company automate the processing of inbound customer orders received by digital fax.

The overall result is 6.2 million transactions processed to date, and 250,000 hours of work returned to the business. But there is one extra ingredient required, particularly for a big company: discipline.

“It took them a while to get to that point in maturity,” explains Segura. “They do have a very central function when it comes to the intelligent automation team, [but] keep in mind one of those processes is in supply chain. That process is regularly reviewing 4.2 million purchase orders; it’s minding 50 million inventory case volume; it’s going through two million SKUs for 8000 suppliers.

“This is highly iterative, but it’s that process of having that lightning rod to capture the requirements and give people who are not necessarily technical a platform and a methodology to iterate very closely with the intelligent automation team,” adds Segura.

Think of what SS&C Blue Prism does therefore as providing a superhero cape for those who don’t otherwise get the chance to step into the limelight. It is a message the company will look to broadcast at the Intelligent Automation event in Santa Clara on 5-6 June.

“SS&C Blue Prism opens up that door to enable your citizen builders really make an impact and deliver strategic benefits to the company,” says Segura. “You’re not just playing with a pilot, not just fooling around with something; you’re really getting into the strategic objectives of the company.”

Photo by Tara Winstead

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

The post The rise of intelligent automation as a strategic differentiator appeared first on AI News.