The global pandemic, ongoing trade concerns, and political conflicts have disrupted business operations, which has, in turn, exacerbated existing workforce issues, created supply shortages, and made demand forecasting and customer engagements more complex.

It is no wonder that intelligent automation has become a key strategy to navigate current market challenges and sustain business performance. Organisations across India are overwhelmingly making intelligent automation a foundational technology to address these and other obstacles.

“Actual bot deployments in India surpasses those in the rest of the world, with 67% of companies having already deployed over 300 bots across their enterprise organisation (compared to just 21% ROW),” reveals a recent report by cloud automation platform Automation Anywhere.

Automation budgets are also dramatically increasing in India with more than three-fourths (93%) of organisations planning to expand these in the next 12 months. Two-thirds (66%) are boosting automation funding by 25% or more, as per the findings of 'The Automation Now & Next' report.

Of the 1,000 global organisations surveyed, more than 90% say automation addresses the impact of geopolitical and economic uncertainty, while remaining a key component to business transformation across India. The research was conducted across eight countries, including India, which represented one of the highest numbers of survey respondents.

The report also indicates that, in India

• 98% of organisations believe automation is helping address supply chain issues.
• 86% of leaders strongly agree that automation has helped them better address staffing shortages, and 95% of these represent senior leadership at the VP level and above.
• 99% agree that collaboration between humans and intelligent assistants will play an important part in their future-of-work strategies.
• 95% support citizen developers to increase automation implementations throughout the enterprise.

Cloud the future of automation

According to the report, cloud-based automations are integral for future-proofing business transformation strategies.

Cloud delivers agility and flexibility to rapidly respond to the nature of today’s quickly evolving environments, which rings true for the 99% of respondents in India who said they’re moving from on-premises to cloud automation – and for the 97% who said they have already adopted a cloud-first approach for all new automation initiatives.

“Automation has become a strategic priority for business leaders across India in the fallout from the pandemic, but it has also become core to digital transformation efforts. The report validates the top drivers for Indian companies adopting automation to be cost savings, business continuity and delivering great customer experiences amid ongoing disruptions,” said Milan Sheth, Executive Vice President of the IMEA Region for Automation Anywhere.

“We create impact at scale by empowering our own resources. We train our employees to build their own automation solutions. If each worker is able to reduce their work time by 30 minutes, that is massive,” added Manish Kumar, Product Owner (Eastern Hemisphere) Digital Productivity Studio for Schlumberger.