HFS Data Viewpoint: Native Automation is arriving fast – but the augmented workforces it promises are not evenly distributed

• Investment in automation accelerated across the board as a result of the impact of Covid-19. HFS data, collected with the support of BluePrism, for our report ‘Your workforce has changed – Now the C-suite must adopt a NATIVE automation mindset’, found Smart Analytics (where 65% of respondents have increased their investment) and RPA (63%) are the biggest winners. Hardly any respondents have reduced their automation budgets.
• These investments are laying down the welcome mat for the change-embracing augmented workforce of the HFS OneOffice Vision 2025—a workforce ready to work better in an environment where autonomy, agility, problem-solving initiative, and purpose-driven alignment are powered by anticipatory insights and delivered with self-improving intelligent processes.
• But we did find significant variance in accelerated investment across industry sectors. In Transport & Logistics artificial intelligence (67%) is leading the charge. Among Healthcare providers, NLP and Virtual Assistants are highlights (54% in each).
• Travel and Hospitality has ramped up investment in Machine Learning more than any other sector (63%) – as it prepares to enable much-changed customer experiences.
• Industrial Manufacturing has the largest percentage of businesses increasing their overall automation investment (62.5%) while Lifesciences showed the least (34%) among our respondents – representatives of 400 of the Global 2000 enterprises.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the laggard on average across all industries, with just 36% of businesses increasing their spend on it.

The HFS Bottomline: The HFS OneOffice-inspired race to Native Automation got an additional push from Covid19 but it is clear some sectors are moving more aggressively and decisively. Business leaders must ensure they keep pace with their sector rivals – as a minimum – to compete on quality of data gathering, analysis, and iterative feedback, delivering power to their people to improve every business decision.