The use of generative AI in business processes increased by 400% in 2023, and the biggest adopters were RevOps (48% of use cases) followed by IT (31%). Perhaps surprisingly, customer support lags behind at 12%.
Highly complex automation cases have almost doubled in the past two years, while 50% of automation cases span four or more departments. The conclusions come from the “Work Automation Index 2024» published this week by work automation platform Workato.
Other key findings. Based on a survey of more than 1,000 mid-sized and enterprise Workato customers, the report finds that automation is driven by both economic headwinds and the constraints they impose, as well as by the growth of generative AI.
- Operational roles are at the forefront of process automation. Sales operations teams automated 27.7% of all processes in 2023.
- Automated processes are becoming increasingly complex, involving more applications and more steps.
- If 56% of automations are still built by IT, it also plays a coaching role on the 44% built by other business teams.
- 11% of automations always keep humans in the loop, for example for approvals.
Dig Deeper: A model for the new automation mentality
Why we care. A perfect storm here resulting from the convergence of two distinct but complementary trends. First, the trend toward automated enterprise – admittedly, to the likely detriment of certain types of manual labor. It’s a trend that Workato CEO Vijay Tella described in his 2023 book “The new automation mentality.”
This trend is independent of generative AI. In other words, automating as many manual business processes as possible would happen if ChatGPT and similar tools had not made generative AI accessible outside the enterprise. But of course, genAI, with its ability to build (and even code) business processes in response to natural language prompts, greatly accelerates automation.
For marketers, it’s fascinating to see RevOps leading the way in genAI.
Get MarTech! Every day. Free. In your inbox.
About the Author
Kim Davis is currently an editor at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim became interested in enterprise software ten years ago. His experience spans enterprise SaaS, data-driven city planning, and digital advertising, as well as applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in marketing. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a marketing technology website, which later became a channel of established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as editor-in-chief, rising to editor-in-chief, then editor-in-chief, a position he held until January 2020. Shortly after, he joined Third Door Media in as editorial director at MarTech.
Kim was an assistant editor at a hyper-local New York Times news site, The Local: East Village, and previously worked as an editor at a college publication and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
