Finance is the lifeline of any organization and the current volatile environment demands that every leader thinks like a CFO and finds ways to optimize expenses. The financial crisis of 2008 has taught us that the enterprises that deployed sustainable cost to serve programs significantly outperformed the competition. Given that companies don’t have a control on revenues, they will focus on the one thing they have control on - costs and hence EBIDTA! Also unlike long programs (months), they need quick and instant results in a few weeks if not days.

The HOLMES Advisory Board met in June 2020 to discuss and deliberate on how AI and automation can be the ‘repeatable and replicable’ building block on which companies can deliver outcomes of economics, efficiency and experience for customers to stay ahead in the game. Customers are moving towards an ‘automation first’ approach and businesses are exploring self-service solutions to customers using digital workers, resulting in reduction in SG&A expenses in business and IT. Organizations need to build centralized automation accountability through cross functional, highly empowered and multi-disciplinary Centers of Excellence to achieve financial, risk/security, experience, and efficiency outcomes. Automation is a journey and requires industrial engineering of processes. The choice of use cases for automation ensures an organization’s efficiency improvement and value creation.

Digital workers can act as a gateway in deploying AI solutions within businesses and a wide variety of business tasks can be driven through the workforce of the future - a combination of digital and human workforce and technology. It thus becomes vital to adopt a programmatic and structured automation approach and culture, and the choice of right use cases/areas is important to avoid technical debt.