ueprint for a new automation mindset

“Together AI and cloud native platforms open the door to automations across our company, allowing new ideas to be automated.

The New Automation Mindset is a new book by Vijay Tella (co-founder and CEO of Workato) and Scott “Chief Martec Brinker, a strategic advisor at Workato. The book was just published last week, and it offers a guide to marketing leaders and other business executives on how they can think about the automation opportunities presented by a AI-dominated technology landscape.

The new mentality

Tella explains the new automation mentality by answering three key questions.

Thinking in terms of systems or tasks? It is not possible to improve productivity by optimizing discrete tasks and applications. This leads to a work overload. The systems thinking approach aims to align people, technology and strategy “holistically” with a business goal.

Do you fear change or embrace it? Tella uses the concept of antifragility. This is the ability not only to withstand, but to prosper in the face shocks and disruptions. When faced with challenges, fragile businesses start to fall apart. Antifragility was evident in many cases as brands re-invented their business models on the fly to cope with a pandemic.

Empowering a team, or empowering specialists? Generative AI may be the ultimate “no-code” tool, despite all its challenges. This implies democratization. There will need to be guardrails, but all members of the team, not just IT experts, can have a say in the digital transformation.

Here’s the blueprint for success: systems thinking and extreme adaptability, as well as democratized teamwork. In this context, “automation,” is a term that can be used to describe “digital transform”, a problem with which many companies have struggled. Digital transformation is largely about automating, scaling up and improving efficiency and accuracy.

The rapid evolution of technologies, including AI and generative AI, is what prompts the need to adopt a new mindset.

How to manage the new environment

This book isn’t a guide on how to use new software. The book does not teach how to use ChatGPT, or how to make a genAI create endless amounts of code. This is a guide to leadership that focuses on how to apply these new technologies in order to improve systems and create authentic teamwork. The book includes chapters on the front and back office, employee and customer experiences, and how to run a platform-driven company.

We asked Scott Brinker, co-author of the book, to highlight some key takeaways. The technology to automate business operations has made tremendous progress over the last few years. This year, generative AI is making another huge leap forward. To really unlock this potential, he added, “we must adapt how we use these tools.” We must think beyond simply automating tasks to make them more efficient. We must use these tools in a holistic way to orchestrate the digital business.

He called the book a guide for leading this transformation.

Dig deep: Accelerate your marketing career now using generative AI

Platform for Generative AI

A second key point is that companies should consider implementing a platform for enterprise AI. Why? Large language models may be loaded with data but they are not smart in most ways: They require close human supervision. Users may not be able to assess the results. Humans are often required to troubleshoot. Access and security must also be taken into consideration.

A platform for enterprise AI can be built with governance and trust. It can customize the LLM training data based on the domain that the platform serves (a local example is MarTechBot which is built using a widely-used LLM, but is also trained with our own data). This platform must also be able go beyond just generating images and text, and can build apps and integrations.

Managing change is difficult, because it requires changes at three different levels.

• Leaders. Leaders must be convinced of the importance automation in the entire organization.
• Builders. The people who are responsible for the execution of the project will need to be willing to learn new skills.
• Recipients. Automation of business processes will have an impact on employees and contractors. The people need to prepare for the fact that their roles will change.

Wiley has published “The New Automation Mindset : The Leadership Blueprint in the Era of AI-for-All”.

The original post A blueprint of the new automation mind-set was published on MarTech.