Introduction
We learned that any piece of any business process is part of the corporate nervous system. If that breaks, nothing is more important than fixing it immediately. Every human in that process universe is a unique individual. And the larger a company becomes, the more complex that network of business processes will get. And then it becomes not only more valuable but also far more vulnerable.
YESTERDAY: The most important part of any IT-enabled business process was digitized, yet they are the weakest link, as there is no intelligence in it. An organization is 100% dependent on the collaborative intelligence of its employees and the technology. Well-documented processes and well-trained employees ensured that the processes are done as designed. Changes were costly, often required change management, and in many cases slowed down operations during the change.
TODAY: The above just shifted into a very different direction. AI-driven Workflows are no longer rigid, deterministic, and standardized processes. Enterprise Workflow Intelligence drives situation-specific, adaptive, intelligent, and fast workflow operation. PROacting AI functionality allows situation-specific workflow adjustments. Adjustments are guided by the intelligent workflow in collaboration with the respective employees. New employees need far less introduction, and organizational adjustments are faster and, in most cases, don’t need change management at all.
ENTERPRISE WORKFLOW INTELLIGENCE is the key driver to the significant productivity gain that AI has been promissing for a few years now.
Three carefully selected words
Enterprise Workflow Intelligence
ENTERPRISE
Medium to large enterprises differ significantly from small and medium businesses, freelancers, individual business owners, and 80% of companies worldwide. One difference, however, is a dangerous beast: Workflows. Market dynamics, technology shifts, employee aging, and new customer behavior have been managed pretty well so far. However, as the speed of change constantly increases, so does the pressure to adjust workflows.
Business workflows already show signs of high tension at today’s change rate, employee growth in large enterprises, skilled worker shortages, and less time to educate thousands of people. Scalability is questioned, high profitability is questioned by investors, and customers and executives sense friction and insufficient workflow, bringing innovation to a halt because they want to fix all those little issues.
There is an undeniable need to re-think workflows
Annual “change management” is a known topic. But it’s also a fearful topic. Mainly because it is literally a brutal change. Not a smooth evolution, not a soft incremental adjustment, but a hard step. This is one of the strategic shifts that Enterprise Workflow Intelligence is introducing. Smaller, more continuous adaptation to markets, customers, technologies, needs, and desires.
WORKFLOW
While we have computers that should help us stay with a proven process, computers always work mechanically, except that the moving parts are electrons on a silicon chip. Rapid organizational changes through new products, different people, new customer behavior, new technology, and so forth are agonizing because those changes require more changes. And if technological improvements bring more and faster changes, we will need to rethink the term “progress.” However, one new technology, AI, which seems to worsen the acceleration of change, gives us the most significant relief: we are no longer bound to mechanical rules and coded and stiffly structured software.
There is an opportunity to completely reimagine workflow mechanics.
AI-based workflows can learn to adjust their inner workings, and our intent to have a given result would not need to change. Even if so, it would be either the intent or the result. If we could manage workflows, we could improve every single aspect of our respective businesses.
We noticed this in our Autonomous Innovation Solution, our Bank CIR Optimization solution, our transformation solution, our compliance management solution, and all the solutions we are currently building and planning to build.
INTELLIGENCE
Bringing INTELLIGENCE into any workflow will advance modern enterprises more than anything else in the past 100 years. Workflow Intelligence is different than intelligent workflows. Workflow Intelligence puts actual intelligence inside the workflow. How does it work? Intelligent Workflows are no longer manually carried out by people but by multiple Autonomous AI Agents. They understand how to read, reason, and think, and trigger other processes to take action to the next level. They can connect and instruct robots, who in return communicate back to agentic AI. Any change that needs to be made could be learned externally or autonomously incorporated into the workflow. If the news enters a Large Language Model, agents would be the first to know and possibly leverage that news instantly. Dangerous? Yes, dangerous like a sharp knife. We all need to consider risks like we consider all other risks. The opportunity: re-imagining workflow mechanics and learning what it takes to develop exponential productivity growth, speed in execution, time to market, operational excellence, and impressive customer experiences.