Automation is everywhere. It creates more efficient processes for your business, which AI can build upon. This article by Brett Hansen highlights how your company can benefit from automation to better manage its data in the future.
It’s no secret that the way we do business has transformed over the last few years. The rate of digital acceleration skyrocketed as employees across sectors (and across the globe) learned how to adjust to their new work-from-anywhere lifestyle. This rate of acceleration became abundantly clear in the realms of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
They’ve certainly been around in some capacity for several years, but artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation were only vaguely familiar terms to the general public before the pandemic. They came to the forefront as companies prioritized tech solutions to solve work-from-home, supply chain, and other pandemic issues.
And as companies adjusted their processes and offerings to accommodate our new normal, and as employees scrambled to figure out how to adjust to an online-only environment—other things fell by the wayside.
AI and Automation: What’s the Difference?
Both automation and AI came into play in big ways, but their distinct differences are important for businesses to understand and utilize. So what exactly are these differences? How do we define them?
AI is typically described as intelligence as demonstrated by machines. A collection of different technologies fall under the umbrella term “AI”, but what they have in common is that they all act with human-level intelligence. Obviously, machines cannot partake in creativity the way that the human brain can, nor can they fully render strategic plans the way humans often do in business, but they are adept at completing a variety of tasks. These tasks include but are not limited to: reading, writing, document processing, scanning, and more. While these tasks seem minute, AI can make a huge difference in freeing up employees’ time and bandwidth so that they can complete their core functions—oftentimes functions that require human creativity, empathy, or business intuition—instead of getting bogged down with the little things.
Automation, on the other hand, is designed to run itself with little or no human interaction. It uses patterns or rules to perform repetitive tasks. Automation already occurs all around us and is used daily in various aspects of our lives. It is most widely used in fields such as eCommerce, telecommunication, banking, and any software that makes automatic bookings or reminds you of appointments.
The main distinction to make here is that AI software is designed to mimic or emulate human thinking, while automation is a type of software that follows pre-established or pre-programmed rules.
Why Automation Is the First Step for Every Business
Whether or not you realize it, automation is everywhere. Whether it is an email from your doctor’s office reminding you of your upcoming visit or an abandoned cart email from an online retailer—these are just a few examples of automation.
But why does automation need to occur as a predecessor to AI? Because automation creates more efficient processes for your business, which AI can build upon. Think about it this way: if you integrate complex AI systems into an inefficient, crumbling company structure, the time and money you spend investing in AI will not be effective. Whatever quality you have going in is the quality that is going to come out.
Automation and Data Management
Part of every company’s foundation is its data. Data encapsulates every piece of recorded information within a company and informs current and future decisions. Considering the important role it plays, integrating tech stacks to help automate and organize this data should be a top priority for any company looking to better its bottom line.
Well-managed and high-quality data is a prerequisite for the proper use of AI to help steward and build a data fabric architecture.Companies like Semarchy are bringing innovative automation solutions to company data management and organizational systems, enabling them to take that first step toward automated and eventually artificially intelligent business solutions. We often work with customers who marry the power of automation and AI to prepare their data to generate insights. Semarchy’s automation engine does the heavy lifting for quality and duplication to provide clean, healthy data. With native APIs, customers can plug in AI/ML to provide capabilities such as enrichment, translation, and classification to further enhance the data. The co-existence of these capabilities can be pragmatically applied based on use case, risk, and business requirements.
Scattered data, informational silos, and vast landscapes of cluttered spreadsheets are no way to organize or run a business. For those looking to advance and integrate emerging technologies, automation is the clear first step toward efficiency. As we look toward the future, consider how your company can benefit from automation to better manage its data.
For more such updates and perspectives around Digital Innovation, IoT, Data Infrastructure, AI & Cybersecurity, go to AI-Techpark.com.
