Intelligent Automation

Trends and Predictions

Your guide to what’s next for intelligent automation
and the future of work

2023
Contents
What’s Next For Intelligent Automation

1 Increasing Focus On Customer And Employee Experience

2 Scaling For Success

3 Rolling Out Citizen Development

Intelligent Automation
Trends and Predictions 4 Tackling Skills Gaps

5 Implementing Unified Workforce Solutions

6 Adding Value During Economic Uncertainty

7 Think Bigger With Artificial Intelligence

Realize The Potential Of Intelligent Automation

What’s Next For
Intelligent Automation
Intelligent automation (IA) is the key to successful digital transformation.
A strategic approach to IA brings much more than the cost savings and
efficiency that come from automating routine tasks. It delivers great
customer experiences and empowers employees.
Through the power of IA, the stage is set for you to change the way people
work for the better. Globally, the challenge of an economic downturn will
call for a top-down reimagining of how work is done. IA, combining multiple
technologies including business process management (BPM), robotic process
70%
of organizations have at
automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) will streamline and scale least piloted automation
process automation and decision making. technologies.
As the leader in RPA and IA, SS&C Blue Prism is uniquely placed to give you — McKinsey Insight
the inside track on what’s next for IA. We’ve gathered data from customers
and analysts and asked thought leaders from across SS&C Blue Prism where
they see automation heading in 2023. The result is seven predictions for IA
that are designed to help you decide where to focus your automation efforts
to deliver transformational value.
1
Increasing Focus On Customer
And Employee Experience
Sharpen focus on CX and EX
As companies prepare for a global economic
downturn, there’ll be a sharper focus on using
IA to deliver tangible outcomes for customers
and employees. The world of work has changed
forever. People are looking for meaningful,
flexible work and a personalized and responsive
buying experience. They want to feel valued
and empowered. IA will help you deliver that.
As IA automates and connects tasks, processes
and operations, you’ll be able to eliminate
functional silos, better align work to outcomes
ACTIONS FOR 2023
• Identify vendors that can help improve your customer and employee experience.
• Think beyond simple efficiency savings to how you can address employee and customer challenges.
• Look for outcome-based technologies.
88%
of business leaders would
feel happier if they didn’t
need to focus as much
and reuse best practice automations. You’ll be
on admin work thanks
able to rethink workflows to improve employee
to automation.
experience and productivity. Employees will
— Empower The People: A Study
collaborate with digital workers, allowing people on Productivity and Engagement
to focus on higher-value work. in the Modern Workplace
All this will lead to a better customer experience.
34%
IA will also let you personalize the customer
experience with automations that tap into
artificial intelligence to predict customer needs,
tailor communications and offer relevant
recommendations. of workers have seen a
change in their roles and
ways of working because
of the implementation of
intelligent automation.
— Deloitte Global Intelligent
Automation survey
 “As the market saturates, we will see vendors try to differentiate
themselves by moving away from the “one-size-fits-all” packaging
and messaging. The focus will shift to outcomes, values and things
that customers care about.”
— Christopher Grønne Skaanild, Head of Competitive Intelligence, SS&C Blue Prism.

Increasing Focus On Customer

And Employee Experience
“The focus on CX in 2023 will continue and sharpen. Research has
What we’re seeing shown that strengthening workplace culture and EX leads to better
customer outcomes. Automation is key to supporting this. It helps
by freeing people to do more meaningful work, as well as delivering
resilience and efficiency.”
— Paul Taylor, CMO of SS&C Blue Prism.

“As we enter challenging economic times, companies will be focused

more on how to retain their customers and employees. Typically,
organizations have focused automation on freeing up resources and
efficiency. In 2023, we will see a strategic shift toward using intelligent
automation for improving customer and employee experiences.”
— Kam Star, VP Product Portfolio, SS&C Blue Prism.

blueprism.com 5
2
Scaling For Success

1/4
New direction for automation growth

As IA moves from tactical automation of tasks As you scale your automations, centers of excellence
to strategic deployment delivering against (COEs) — central teams to scale and govern of automation COEs will
broader business outcomes, we’ll see companies automation — play a key role. We expect cloud IA reorganize to support
scaling IA enterprise-wide. IA at scale provides will increasingly support federated COEs with more federated development.
orchestration of work and governance so that employee involvement. This optimum fusion team — Forrester Predictions 2023:
you can react quickly to changing needs and comprises IT, COE and citizens with leadership from Automation and Robotics
continuously improve. There are several ways technical experts. This approach gives you flexibility
you can approach scaling. while ensuring quality through top-down governance.
IA in the cloud provides the benefits of RPA at
scale — and includes secure infrastructure and
management services. Cloud RPA gives you a
prebuilt digital workforce with a range of skills
In 2023, analyst firm Forrester predicts COEs will
migrate functions and staff to primary business
lines. At the same time, strategic COE functions
87%
of organizations have
such as security, automation architecture and
that can quickly adapt to your needs. enterprise governance will remain centralized. accelerated their investment
in cloud-hosted automation
ACTIONS FOR 2023
services in the past year.
— Deloitte Global Intelligent
• Identify your business’ barriers to scaling. Deloitte found top barriers were process fragmentation, Automation survey
lack of a clear vision, lack of IT readiness and resistance to change. Working with SS&C Blue Prism,
you can develop practical solutions.
• Consider adopting SS&C | Blue Prism® Cloud to drive scale, hand-in-hand with your people,
reducing build time and supporting a federated model.

“Forrester blog: ‘Predictions 2022”: The Pandemic’s Wake Drives Automation Trends”, by Craig Le Clair, October 28, 2021.
 “Scaling automation is a key driver for success. This year, we see leaders
looking to further engage the broader organization in automation.
Whether that’s by getting more employees involved earlier in automation
Scaling For Success or closing the skills gap — wider involvement trends are leading to higher
adoption rates and better outcomes.
What we’re seeing Ultimately, we see a shift towards a federated COE model for
automation. This is because this approach delivers faster adoption
and increases engagement.”
— Kam Star, VP Product Portfolio, SS&C Blue Prism.

“The next year will see organizations scale their automation programs
beyond their IT departments and into the mainstream – with executive
level buy-in and incentivization for employees.”
— Colin Redbond, SVP, Technology, Architecture and AI, SS&C Blue Prism.

blueprism.com 7
3
Rolling Out Citizen Development
Creating fusion teams

Enterprise IA takes time and resources. If your IT
team is stacked with work, likely, you won’t see
the benefits of IA as quickly as you need them.
This is where citizen development comes in.
Combining business users’ expertise in processes
with training in low-code development speeds
up transformation. They can use drag-and-drop
tools to automate their work. Business users are
also best placed to identify automations that will
power to automate tasks as part of a well-governed
2024
By 2024, most organizations
enterprise automation strategy. will leverage codeless
development tools for at
Citizen development is gaining traction fast — one
least 30% of their AI and
in six organizations is already implementing it.
It’s important, though, to make sure that citizen automation initiatives.
development doesn’t cause more problems than it — IDC, Future Scape Artificial
solves. Not every employee will want to be a citizen Intelligence and Automation
2023 Predictions
developer. Or they might not see the bigger picture,
automating their own needs in a way that does not

41%
deliver the best return on investment. A federated work at scale or that might introduce risk.
citizen development model gives employees the

of organizations have
ACTIONS FOR 2023 active citizen
development initiatives.
• Identify potential citizen developers in your workforce. These will be people who are curious — Gartner survey on IT and
about automation and have some tech skills. At the same time, they appreciate the need for citizen development
security and governance.
• Learn more about fostering and deploying citizen development in our Federated Citizen
Development Handbook here.

Rolling Out Citizen Development
What we’re seeing
blueprism.com
“There will be a massive focus on enhancing the user journey for citizen
developers and the automations they create. As citizen development can
be difficult to scale, leaders will carefully plan how to govern, maintain
and scale these initiatives. One approach organizations are taking is
creating fusion teams of technical and citizen developers.”
— Christopher Grønne Skaanild, Head of Competitive Intelligence, SS&C Blue Prism.
“Until recently, automation was either imprisoned within a centralized
and over-worked “Center of Excellence”, or distributed across silos of
an organization – causing automation chaos. The maturation of fusion
teams – where citizen developers within a business work collaboratively
with expert or pro automation developers to identify and define
automations that make sense for common use cases and scenarios –
will transform the success of automation programs.”
— Colin Redbond, SVP, Technology, Architecture and AI, SS&C Blue Prism.
9
4
Tackling Skills Gaps
Focusing skills investment

Business success depends on skilled and

productive people. Talent is a challenge facing
71% of enterprise decision-makers — and 90%
say this will impact their growth plans. As you
plan to scale up your IA, the lack of skilled
employees could become an issue.
Forrester’s 2022 data shows that one-third of
enterprise decision makers involved in automation
Citizen development goes some way to address
this issue, empowering business employees
1/4
of enterprises will blame
to automate while freeing up skilled IT people skill shortages for slow
to focus on complex tasks. Machine learning automation progress.
supports IT too, automating decision-making
— Forrester Predictions 2023:
processes and reducing development time to Automation and Robotics
hours rather than days or weeks.

35%
projects state that the lack of technical skills and
experience among technical staff is the biggest
challenge of adopting automation technologies.
Persistent talent gaps will
drive 35% of IT organizations
to invest in AI skills by 2023.
ACTIONS FOR 2023
— IDC Future Scape Artificial Intelligence
and Automation 2023 Predictions
• Assess skills across your business — consider how best to direct your investment in upskilling workers.
• Invest in a platform that helps reduce build time and technical expertise, using no code or low
code RPA/IA.
• Consider how partners, cloud or managed services could help reduce the burden on your IT team.
 “Anyone and everyone can build automations. But building a
foundationally stable, reusable and secure automation is a vastly
different endeavor. Securing the right talent that fits the maturity level,
Tackling Skills Gaps complexity and vendor choice is difficult. Vendors will increase or
change certification to help customers identify ideal candidates.”
What we’re seeing — Christopher Grønne Skaanild, Head of Competitive Intelligence, SS&C Blue Prism.

“Next year, I see the skills shortage being exacerbated. Especially, as the
technical abilities required to deliver intelligent automation are vastly
different from RPA alone. The people who have these skills need to be
multi-disciplinary, which makes them in short supply. They need to have
the ability to manage technology, analyze processes and understand
complex design patterns.”
— Dan Ternes, CTO APAC, SS&C Blue Prism.

blueprism.com 11
5
Implementing Unified
Workforce Solutions
People and technology working together

IA provides digital workers to supplement and
support people 24/7. While digital workers
manage routine tasks, people are free to focus
on tasks that require creative thinking or human
relationships with customers, peers and partners.
Unifying the workforce boosts business outcomes
while benefiting people too, letting employees
focus on more rewarding work.
The optimum unified workforce connects people
and digital workers to create a single workforce,
rather than digital workers working alone in silos.
85%
This can only happen when work is reimagined
from standalone tasks to a new paradigm where
processes and workflows are designed for end-
to-end customer, employee and user journeys.
of organizations are
There needs to be a strategic shift in mindset, from rethinking how work
tactical automation to end-to-end automated is done.
business processes. Unified workforce solutions are — Deloitte Global Intelligent
key to supporting this ambition and will become Automation survey
a key focus for businesses looking to evolve from
task-based automation.

ACTIONS FOR 2023

• Consider implementing IA platforms that bring together multiple technologies, from RPA
to BPM to machine learning, to deliver end-to-end automation.
• Focus on how technology can let people concentrate on customer-facing tasks while digital
workers handle routine tasks.
 “In the coming year, we will see greater recognition by organizations
of the need to adopt a strategy of combining digital and human labour,
to drive efficiencies and improved customer experiences. Digital Workers
Implementing Unified Workforce Solutions have the ability to free their human counterparts to take on tasks where
insight, empathy and other high value skills are required to deliver on
What we’re seeing customer excellence.”
— Colin Redbond, SVP, Technology, Architecture and AI, SS&C Blue Prism.

“People will play an increasingly complementary role in delivering the

expected results of process automation. Work will be triaged between
people and digital workers. Digital will handle the standard transactions
represented by accept-reject-yes-no; people will handle the complex,
out-of-the-ordinary transactions represented by refer-maybe.”
— Dan Ternes, CTO APAC, SS&C Blue Prism.

blueprism.com 13
6 10%
Adding Value During
Economic Uncertainty of automation budgets
Improving what you already have will shift to resilience.
— Forrester Predictions 2023:
During times of economic uncertainty, customers IA that automates entire processes, reimagining Automation and Robotics
will demand greater value, especially in products them for improved customer and employee

40%
and services affected by rising costs and supply experience, is where the true value lies that
and labor shortages. will futureproof your business as it navigates
periods of uncertainty.
In turn, businesses will focus on resilience and
efficiency. Businesses are achieving this by using IDC forecasts that IT departments will need to of the G2000 will adopt
automation to counter the economic impact work closely with line-of-business leads to add tooling to quantify, predict
on labor and materials costs. IA delivers real new AI-infused, sophisticated operational use and optimize the cost
opportunities for efficiency savings and boosting cases to drive efficiency and quality across the of their AI lifecycle — in
productivity. However, when finances are tight, entire operations lifecycle. response to sustainability
the temptation is to stop at task automations
and uncertain economic
that deliver clear ROI in cost savings.
conditions.
— IDC, Future Scape Artificial
ACTIONS FOR 2023 Intelligence and Automation
2023 Predictions
• Look at how you carry out your work and support customers. Don’t simply automate that.
How could it be better for employees and customers?
• Identify where you could improve on what you have with a digital workforce.
• Use process intelligence tools to continuously optimize automated processes and make
data-driven decisions.
 “As companies prepare for the possible continued economic downturn,
there’s a major focus on helping customers drive value from what they have.
Improving what you have is key. Whether that’s upping utilization, enhancing
Adding Value During maintenance or testing and upgrading procedures to lower costs.”
Economic Uncertainty
— Christopher Grønne Skaanild, Head of Competitive Intelligence, SS&C Blue Prism.

What we’re seeing

“Recession and capital flight are impacting the asset management
industries, as people seek to outpace inflation and find safe places for
their capital. Fund/Asset Managers are being stared down by a trifecta of
challenges — post-pandemic shock, the Great Resignation and the shift to
remote workplace models. Therefore, changing the way work gets done
and how customers are supported is now more important than ever.”
— Paul Taylor, CMO of SS&C Blue Prism.

blueprism.com 15
7 78%
Think Bigger With
Artificial Intelligence of organizations are
looking to use tools such
Automate the enterprise with artificial intelligence (AI)
as automation and AI to
improve productivity.
AI and technologies from machine learning to tasks and whether a person or digital worker — Productivity Squared —
process intelligence are driving the next wave A study of business growth,
would carry out the task best. It helps people to
productivity & intelligent
of productivity gains from IA. They’re doing work with a digital worker just as if that digital automation’s role today and
this by enriching end-to-end IA to support worker were any other colleague. in the future.
data-driven business decisions. What does
AI technology allows digital workers and IA

75%
this mean in practice?
systems to learn as they go, improving processes
AI automates human-like decisions within processes. all the time and, eventually, creating knowledge
AI predicts future demand based on past trends centers that other processes can tap into. AI
and assigns work accordingly. It connects digital technologies are here now and will drive a By 2026, 75% of large
workers and people and determines when to assign fundamental shift in automation. enterprises will rely on AI-
infused processes to enhance
asset efficiency, streamline
ACTIONS FOR 2023 supply chains and improve
product quality across diverse
• Consider how AI technologies can take your business to the next level of end-to-end IA. and distributed environments.
• Look for platforms with AI or machine learning already incorporated. — IDC, Future Scape Artificial
Intelligence and Automation
• Ensure AI-powered decision making is explainable and auditable. 2023 Predictions
 “We’re seeing new ways for people, digital workers, apps and processes
to connect, talk and work together. Both using what exists and new
technologies. As the search for customer and end-user value continues,
we’ll see a mix of solutions and examples of how one might connect
Think Bigger With Artificial Intelligence seemingly disparate entities into a cohesive value-driving solution.
What we’re seeing Proper AI-enabled automation solutions will begin to arise, utilizing
tech like generative AI algorithms.”
— Christopher Grønne Skaanild, Head of Competitive Intelligence, SS&C Blue Prism.

“The next big shift in artificial intelligence is undoubtedly generative AI.

In the last 12 months, we’ve seen spectacular advancement in being
able to turn text into almost anything, whether that’s ‘text to images’
or ‘text to code generation’ or ‘text-building applications.’ We see ‘Text
to automation’ as just around the corner with these advances. I believe
we’ll see the first commercially available offering in 2023, and with it,
the dawn of the age of ‘computer automate this task for me.”
— Colin Redbond, SVP, Technology, Architecture and AI, SS&C Blue Prism.
Realize The Potential Of
ANALYSTS AND CUSTOMERS TRUST US TO
DELIVER VALUE WITH AUTOMATION

Intelligent Automation
In 2023, innovators and leaders will drive IA across the enterprise,
reimagining work and making the best use of intelligent technologies
to deliver rewarding customer and employee experiences.

At SS&C Blue Prism, we have the expertise, the technology and the
vision to maximize your strategic business value with IA, helping you
exceed customer expectations, stay competitive and accelerate growth. A 2022 Gartner Magic
QuadrantTM Leader for
Robotic Process Automation

Get Started

Start your digital transformation journey by speaking

with one of our intelligent automation experts.
Click below and please indicate your industry or SS&C Blue Prism allows organizations to deliver transformational business value via our intelligent
area of interest so we can best assist you. automation platform. We make products with one aim in mind — to improve experiences for people.
By connecting people and digital workers, you can use the right resource, every time, for the best
CONTACT US customer and business outcomes. We supply enterprise-wide software that not only provides full
Email us at bpm-contact@sscinc.com to learn how control and governance but also allows businesses to react fast to continuous change.
SS&C Blue Prism can help your organization realize Exceed customer expectations, stay competitive, accelerate growth.
transformational business value with intelligent automation. To learn more, visit www.blueprism.com and follow us on Twitter @blue_prism and on LinkedIn.

©2022 Blue Prism Limited. “Blue Prism,” the “Blue Prism” logo and Prism device are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Blue Prism Limited and its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
References

1. Your Questions about Automation Answered, Mckinsey

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/your-questions-about-
automation-answered

2. Predictions 2023: Automation And Robotics, Forrester

https://www.forrester.com/report/predictions-2023-automation-and-robotics/RES178243

3. Deloitte’s Global Intelligent Automation survey, Deloitte

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/technology-and-the-future-of-work/
intelligent-automation-2022-survey-results.html

4. IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Artificial Intelligence and Automation 2023 Predictions, IDC
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US49748122

5. The Importance of Citizen Development and Citizen IT, Gartner

https://blogs.gartner.com/jason-wong/importance-citizen-development-citizen/

6. Identifies the Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022, Gartner

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-10-18-gartner-identifies-the-
top-strategic-technology-trends-for-2022