Process automation became en vogue more than a decade ago, as organizations looked to make their workflows and business processes more efficient. But many of those process automation efforts have failed to bear sufficient fruit, due to a variety of technical, economic and cultural issues.
There is a new and better way to make process automation more actionable and beneficial. Intelligent automation—using artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning and other technologies—can improve productivity, customer experience, innovation and profitability to drive businesses forward.
How Intelligent Automation Works
Earlier automation tools—scripts, runbooks, optical-character recognition and others—introduced enterprises to the core benefit of process automation. These tools reduced and even eliminated manual processes that require a lot of manpower and hands-on management such as provisioning and performance tuning.
But today’s business requirements are far more demanding, pushing organizations to make decisions faster and based on a far larger and more diverse set of data. Organizations simply cannot hire enough smart people, or give them enough first-generation tools, to keep up with the tasks demanded.
Fortunately, intelligent automation solutions have come to the forefront. Intelligent automation employs artificial intelligence to create systems that work autonomously, learn from humans and then from their own experiences, and adapt to rapidly changing, moment-to-moment business, economic and cultural conditions.
Such advances are helping countless organizations reduce manual tasks, accelerate development of new systems that reduce friction in business processes, increase organizational agility and trim operating costs. However, there is an urgent need to develop and deploy intelligent automation solutions now. As research data from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services highlights,1 “Many organizations either aren’t moving ahead fast enough to keep pace with change or they’re rushing ahead with isolated projects but without a greater plan.” The report adds that “business and technology leaders who don’t develop a strategy for enterprise-wide intelligent automation will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.”
The 2025 Imperative: Intelligent Automation Now
Read this paper to learn why delaying technology to improve business processes could put your organization at a competitive disadvantage moving forward.
Download NowHow Oracle Makes Intelligent Automation a Reality
Along with a complete understanding of use cases, workloads and associated business processes, successful intelligent automation projects depend on three essential drivers: automation, cloud infrastructure and advanced analytics. There aren’t a lot of technology partners that can bring all three elements together, but Oracle combines its expertise in software, hardware, services and cloud computing to make intelligent automation more than a priority scribbled on a whiteboard.
At the heart of Oracle’s intelligent automation platform is Oracle Autonomous Database, a multimodel, converged, autonomous database. It leverages machine learning to automate the full database lifecycle. Autonomous Database provides workload-optimized cloud services for transaction processing, data warehousing and development of JSON-centric applications.
Data protection and security are automated, without the need for dedicated personnel to handle those responsibilities manually. Autonomous Database also handles database repair by automating failure detection and failover, preventing data loss and costly downtime.
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, optimized for analytical processing, eliminates all the complexities of operating a data warehouse. It automates provisioning, configuration and backup, as well as tasks related to securing, performance tuning and scaling the data warehouse. It additionally includes built-in tools for self-service data loading, data transformation, business modeling and automated insights. Analysts can use graphs and spatial analytics, build machine learning models and create new applications themselves with no-code/low-code built-in tools. Autonomous Data Warehouse is available both in Oracle’s public cloud and in a customer’s on-premises data center via Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer.
For more information on how to put intelligent automation to work for your organization, please refer to this Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report. And try Oracle Autonomous Database for free!
1 “The 2025 Imperative: Intelligent Automation Now,” Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, 2020
