Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Workato, the leading Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered automation and integration platform, unveiled its third annual Work Automation Index. The data report presents the key trends that shaped automation over the past year based on anonymised data from 1,055 midsize to enterprise Workato customers.

This year’s data reveals how recent economic headwinds and AI momentum are setting the stage for massive change and adoption across industries, companies, and departments.

During this time of rapid change, a new automation mindset that embraces agility, systems thinking, and inclusiveness is on the rise, demonstrating how organisations are revolutionising the way they work with AI, automation, and integration.

Broken down into six megatrends, this year’s report takes a deep dive into trends in AI, citizen developers, tool sprawl, experience, data strategy, and, to conclude, the rise of The New Automation Mindset.

One of the main takeaways from the report is the use of generative AI in business processes skyrocketed by 400%. While it is still reported that generative AI is less than 1% of enterprise spending, over the last year alone processes with generative AI grew by 400% while generative AI endpoints grew by 500%.

“If 2023 was the year of AI, 2024 will most certainly be the year of Automation and AI. As we see more and more teams rapidly adopt the right guardrails, governorship, and tools to scale AI and Automation, IT teams have taken a strategic role in ensuring success across the business,” said Carter Busse, Chief Information Officer at Workato.

He added: “From revenue operation teams leading the adoption of generative AI tools to the citizen development trend continuing to show strong stability as more automation work is handled by teams outside of IT, we’ll continue to see this type of hyper-growth and adoption as automation and AI become more accessible.”

Growing Adoption of AI and Implementation of Automation

From finance becoming the most automated department to HR seeing the value in automation to help improve the employee experience, the business landscape will continue to see this type of growth and adoption as automation becomes more accessible across departments.

This year’s report identified the following key findings:

• Revenue and IT operations lead generative AI adoption. Revenue operation is the top adopter of genAI with 48% of processes, and IT is in second place with 31% of use cases.
• Operations roles are automating more processes than any other group. Business operations teams automated 27.7% of all processes in 2023—more than any other subgroup across IT or business teams.
• Automated processes are growing more complex: Over time, there has emerged a consistent trend that processes connect to more apps, involve more steps, and require more sophisticated logic.
• 11% of automated processes in 2023 include humans in the loop. A large percentage of automated processes are designed for human interactions, such as approvals or exception handling.
• IT is evolving into a player-coach role. 56% of automations are still built by IT personas, but IT is also being tasked with governance and guidance for the 44% handled by business teams.
• EMEA and APJ regions are adopting automation practices at record speed. EMEA saw a 209% year-over-year growth in recipe development while APJ saw 173% growth year-over-year.

“Over the last year, we’ve seen a rise in businesses embracing AI and automation. Leaders are becoming increasingly aware of how ingrained AI needs to be in our strategies, decisions, and digital transformations,” said Saiesh Prakash, Senior Manager, Enterprise Integrations, at Coinbase.

Workato’s Anonymised Comprehensive Research

Designed to uncover the workflows used and the role automation and AI play across departments and functions, this year’s Work Automation Index analysed 1,055 midsize (USD$50 million to USD$2 billion in annual revenue) to enterprise (over USD $2 billion in annual revenue) Workato customers who use automation in their businesses.

This research was conducted using anonymized data sampled over 36 months from 2021 to 2023.

Click here to download the full report. To learn more about Workato’s AI-powered automation and integration solutions, visit www.workato.com.

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