Top 7 Intelligent Automation Use Cases Across Industries

Intelligent automation use cases are transforming the way organizations approach process improvement. While traditional automation methods have successfully streamlined simple tasks, they tend to rely on strict pre-defined rules.

That’s why many future-focused organizations are turning towards the far more flexible alternative: intelligent automation. Intelligent automation includes RPA, AI, OCR, process mining, machine learning, intelligent capture, and more. This set of technologies uses AI algorithms to analyze data and make decisions, allowing them to adapt to changing circumstances even in the most complex of processes. As a result, you experience more accurate, efficient processes and the ability to tackle any process challenge that comes your way.

Let’s explore seven intelligent automation use cases that will make your work life better, regardless of your business’s industry or size.

Where is Intelligent Automation Used?

1. Data Entry and Updates

Manual data entry is time-consuming, tiresome, and highly prone to human error, which takes even more time to fix and can cause compliance issues. Fortunately, intelligent automation can keep up with the nuances of data entry using intelligent bots. These bots can integrate your organization’s core systems, and you can program them to update databases across your organization, like customer services or HR. To accomplish this, they extract data from emails, reports, employee records, enterprise applications, customer service interactions, paper documents, and more. And they can do all this with an increasingly low error rate since these technologies learn as they go and improve their efficiency and accuracy over time.

2. Payroll Processing

Accurate, timely payroll is vital for happy employees. However, payroll processing includes many manual, error-prone tasks like overtime, PTO, and calculating commissions. AI-powered bots can reduce your error rate and time spent on these activities by:

• Building reports on payroll statistics, enabling you to make data-driven decisions
• Recording overtime and applying this data to compensation
• Tracking commission according to your organization’s commission rules
• Aggregating timesheet data from login platforms
• Providing automatic employment verification

3. Data Extraction

Intelligent bots powered by AI components like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) can significantly improve your data extraction accuracy. While standard OCR technology is limited to structured data and rigid templates, intelligent technology can extract unstructured data from images, PDFs, or handwritten documents. The bots then use AI to comprehend the document’s context, allowing it to learn and make more informed and accurate decisions.

4. Recruitment & Onboarding

Recruitment

Many organizations struggle to keep up with the hundreds if not thousands of job applications they receive every time a new position opens. By the time you’re ready to hire, your candidate is already employed elsewhere. Intelligent automation accelerates the recruiting process so you can scoop up top talent before your competitors can. NLP-driven bots can gather and screen resumes and send emails to candidates based on their results. As a result, your HR team can spend less time plowing through paperwork and more time engaging with your most promising candidates. These intelligent bots can also connect you with strong potential candidates that you otherwise may have missed by scraping data from recruitment websites.

Employee Onboarding

Only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding new employees, according to a recent Gallup poll. And it’s no surprise. Employee onboarding is notoriously repetitive and time-consuming, which can stifle the excitement of a new employee’s first week. Intelligent bots can ease the burden by coordinating onboarding tasks across departments and accelerating the onboarding process by:

• Giving new hires access to the files and applications they need on day one, rather than having to wait until a few days in.
• Creating accounts and delivering credentials for new hires so they can begin using your company’s vital tools immediately.
• Answering FAQs and collecting questions and feedback.
• Delivering relevant onboarding documents to new hires.
• Easing the training process by walking new hires through processes step by step. This adds consistency to the training process, too, since it eliminates the risk of you forgetting a training step.

With these administrative tasks out of the way, your HR team can spend giving new hires a more personalized, 1-on-1 experience.

Customer Onboarding

Intelligent automation can also streamline customer onboarding so you can create the best first impression possible for your new clients. AI-powered bots accelerate the processes involved by:

• Collecting important documents from the customers
• Verifying all information submitted
• Extracting data from documents and transferring it into your core systems
• Guiding customers through every step of the process

5. Financial Reporting

Financial departments run reports regularly and face increasingly intense pressure to be timely and accurate. After all, these reports reflect a company’s market status, compliance with regulations, and can act as a basis for its forecasts. There’s literally no room for error. Fortunately, intelligent automation can help you make this process faster and more accurate. It first extracts data from your core business systems and relevant documents. It then performs data manipulations as needed and assembles reports in the formats you specify. Finally, it delivers the final reports to the correct stakeholders.

6. Accounts Payable & Accounts Receivable Automation

Intelligent automation can help your AP and AR departments reduce errors and prevent miscalculations and delayed payments to vendors. In the case of AP processes, AI-powered intelligent bots can:

• Track vendor data and transactions
• Cross-check invoices against purchase orders for accuracy
• Capture data from invoices with different formats using intelligent document processing
• Route documents to the correct employees to handle exceptions
• Check for fraudulent documents using fraud detection algorithms

For AR processes, the bots can:

• Automatically generate invoices
• Monitor days-sales-outstanding (DSO)
• Process payments
• Send customers reminders on the due date via email
• Reconcile the balance sheets after payments have occurred

7. Boost Security Measures

Security breaches and other disasters can be incredibly damaging to your bottom line and reputation. To combat this threat, organizations are using AI to identify patterns at a more comprehensive scale than any human could detect. This feature comes in handy for risk assessment and management efforts, whether predicting the likelihood of cybersecurity threats or potential supply chain disruptors.

It’s Time to Embrace Intelligent Automation

As these popular examples have shown, intelligent automation doesn’t just save you money and boost your efficiency. It fundamentally changes how you work, which improves the day-to-day lives of your employees and customers. In our rapidly changing workforce, intelligent automation is only becoming more crucial to your business’s long-term success. It provides the flexibility you need to adapt and innovate, no matter what the future brings.

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