UK Economic Crunch Drives Interest in Modern Automation

Many enterprises in Britain are investing in intelligent automation platforms to contain costs and remain competitive, ISG Provider Lens report says

Enterprise adoption of intelligent automation in the U.K. has been on the rise and is expected to keep growing in the coming year, according to a new research report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

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“New, integrated platforms that use a combination of technologies are delivering on the promise of automation.”

The 2022 ISG Provider Lens™ Intelligent Automation — Platforms and Products report for the U.K. finds Britain’s demand for automation is strong in several sectors, especially among business teams in customer service, administration/operations, R&D, finance and accounting, and marketing. Automation technologies have reached a new level of maturity and readiness for real-world business applications.

“Intelligent automation is becoming pervasive and having an impact on the lives of consumers, citizens and businesses in the U.K.,” said Chip Wagner, CEO, ISG Automation. “New, integrated platforms that use a combination of technologies are delivering on the promise of automation.”

With the British economy in the throes of stagflation, negative GDP growth could dampen enterprise investments in technology, but rising labor and supply costs provide more incentive to adopt automation technologies that reduce operating expenses, ISG says. At the same time, the national government is strongly committed to investing in emerging technologies, especially through encouraging more use of intelligent automation in the public sector.

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Recent advances have increased the power of core intelligent automation platforms, especially when those platforms are used in combination, the report says. Conversational AI is evolving to provide seamless omnichannel experiences that combine voice, text and other modes of synchronous and asynchronous communication. Intelligent document processing (IDP) has moved beyond its origins in optical character recognition to now being able to scan, extract and analyze information from many types of documents at scale.

Process discovery and task mining technologies, which can identify complex workflows and human tasks within an organization’s business processes, allow enterprises to pinpoint where intelligent automation platforms can make the most difference, ISG says. For example, digitizing and analyzing records using IDP and understanding operations through process discovery enables more effective robotic process automation (RPA) initiatives.

“The latest automation tools are much more effective at solving real-world business problems,” said Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research. “Service providers are making it easier for enterprises to integrate these tools into their systems and processes.”

The report also explores other intelligent automation trends in the U.K., including the changing roles of non-professional developers and other challenges enterprises face in adopting new platforms.

The 2022 ISG Provider Lens™ Intelligent Automation — Platforms and Products report for the U.K. evaluates the capabilities of 56 providers across three quadrants: Conversational AI Platforms, Intelligent Document Processing, and Process Discovery and Mining.

The report names ABBYY and UiPath as Leaders in two quadrants each. It names Amelia, Automation Anywhere, Celonis, Creative Virtual, Google Dialogflow, Kofax, Kore.ai, Microsoft and Minit as Leaders in one quadrant each.

In addition, Avaamo is named as a Rising Star — a company with a “promising portfolio” and “high future potential” by ISG’s definition — in one quadrant.