T rend 1 Intelligent Automation: The essential new co- worker for the digital ageT rend 1Intelligent Automation: T he essential new co-worker for the digital ageLeaders will embrace automation not just to take advantage of the breakneck pace of digital change, but also to create a new digital world where they hold competitive advantage. Machines and artificial intelligence will be the newest recruits to the workforce, bringing new skills to help people do new jobs, and reinventing whats possible.2T echnology Vision 2016Machines and artificial intelligence will be the newest recruits to the workforce, bringing new skills to help people do new jobs, and reinventing whats possible.Customers at Singapores Timbre restaurant will notice something is different. Instead of waiters carrying dishes to and from the kitchen, autonomous drones now fly dirty dishes off customer tables. Visitors to Siemens so-called lights out manufacturing plant will notice a change, too, as Siemens has automated some of its production lines to the point where they can run unsupervised for several weeks.1This is intelligent automation in action today. On the surface it may appear to be a simple transfer of tasks from man to machine. But look a little closer. The real power of intelligent automation lies in its ability to fundamentally change traditional ways of operating, for businesses and individuals. These machines offer strengths and capabilities (scale, speed, and the ability to cut through complexity) that are different frombut crucially complementary tohuman skills. And their increasing sophistication is invigorating the workplace, changing the rules of whats possible so that people and their new digital co- workers can together do things differently. And do different things.Look again at Siemens lights out manufacturing plant. While it may seem like a transfer of tasks from people to machines, for Siemens its a step toward a larger goal of creating the fully self-organizing factory (aka Industrie 4.0). Here, machines will largely organize themselves, supply chains will automatically link themselves together, and orders will be directly converted into manufacturing information that is incorporated into the production process. This will make the industrialized manufacture of highly customizable products a reality. Before you assume that people are cut out of this loop, you should recognize that even Siemens lights out manufacturing plant requires 1,150 employees to support it. They just have different roles than before, as many are now focused on programming, monitoring, and machine maintenance.23T echnology Vision 2016T rend 1: Intelligent AutomationIntelligent automation is being used across multiple industries to create new value for businesses and society alike.Natural Language Processing: Finance companies apply NLP to compliance and fraud prevention by monitoring electronic communications at financial institutions to identify relationships and entities across threads.Computer Vision: Law enforcement uses computer vision on facial recognition systems to identify or verify a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source.Knowledge Representation: Healthcare providers use a system to analyze massive amounts of data to extract useful sections, such as doctor names, costs, and number of complaints, in order to create a clean and easy way to find the root cause of declining clinic performance.Reasoning and Planning: Automated planning and scheduling, typically for execution by autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles, from warehouse to retail store to household.Examples like these are popping up everywhere as leading organizations are driving more and more of their processes into smarter machines. Their goal is not restricted to performing the same tasks faster and more efficiently. Theyve understood that intelligent automation changes the rules by empowering the creation of new products and services on a scale that was previously infeasible. And theyre already rethinking what they do across every area of the enterprisefrom their business processes right through to the customer experiences they provide.Far from killing jobs and creating a dehumanized future, pioneering companies are using intelligent automation to drive a newand much more productiverelationship between people and machines. Leaders are exploiting this potential. For example, luxury retailer Moda Operandi was able to scale and improve its high-touch customer service, where stylists provide personalized recommendations and one-to-one communications with clients. By building a new personalization engine that allows a single stylist to work with up to 300 customers (compared to 5075 previously), the company is able to offer the same luxury services to its valued clients as it does to its very top customers.3Discussions and projecti