As the global climate crisis continues to worsen, creating sustainable organisations has become a key business focus across the Asia Pacific (Apac) region in the past few years. However, most organisations fall short of their technical know-how to achieve this goal successfully. The struggle is substantiated by a lack of proper support or the technical expertise to measure its impact in the domain.
Following the World Economic Forum in Davos held in May this year, it was confirmed that digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation, have the power to decarbonise operations and reduce emissions by up to 20%.
Implementing end-to-end automation for scalable results
As the pressure to reduce carbon emissions and go net zero increases worldwide, large-scale businesses need to plan for an organisation-wide transformation strategy -- one that will impact every department and the entire business and its operations. With customers becoming more conscious and regulations stricter, businesses have no option but to adopt more climate-conscious strategies and focus on net zero. However, the road to net zero can be challenging, as it involves ensuring top-level accountability, adequate investments, organisation-wide resource redistribution, realignment of business strategy with net zero goals, innovation expenditures, staff engagement, and training.
This makes it evident that businesses need reliable support in understanding their energy consumption and successfully making an impact towards moving to net zero carbon emissions. There is also a heavy reliance on carbon-intensive technologies in industries like manufacturing, as well as many manpower, infrastructure and offices. Adapting the right technology can help reduce the dependence on humans, infrastructure to support the physical staff, and bridge the gap between data and implementation.
In this regard, end-to-end automation can prove to be one of the most efficient technological solutions. Intelligent automation combines Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and AI to create a holistic solution that can maximise business efficiency while reducing the total carbon footprint. AI-powered tools automatically observe workflows and create automation solutions to replicate them. Furthermore, integrating machine learning can help deduce future courses of action for a certain set of scenarios, using historical data and past experiences.
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More importantly, organisations across the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) are increasing automation investments relating to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) functions. According to the IDC APJ Automation Survey 2022, commissioned by UiPath, over 30% of the APJ organisations are expected to garner automation investments for related use cases in the next three years (an increase of 17% from 2021). Most large organisations are trying to report ESG, and typically that requires enormous amounts of data and information to be collected, analysed and reported to various stakeholders, sometimes half-yearly or even quarterly. Since this data is not usually available in standard tools such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software but sits across the entire supply chain for enterprises, automation helps digitise and collect this data at the frequency required to meet reporting and compliance expectations.
Therefore, combining intelligent automation with AI and machine learning can vastly reduce the need for human intervention, save costs, improve efficiency, and basically automate a large variety of tasks that earlier needed physical resources and time investment. This form of digitisation can not only make significant strides in businesses’ net zero goals but also provide a competitive edge in the rapidly evolving digital economy.
Changes in technological capabilities around the globe
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As the world moves towards 5G capabilities, and adapts to new technologies, the need for humans to perform manual and repetitive tasks will continue to reduce. A good example is ICICI Bank, which has automated over 250 processes in 2021 and plans to automate over 500 re-engineered processes by the end of 2022. These automation projects have allowed the bank to achieve improved customer experience, cost savings, agility and scalability to handle volume surges amongst many other benefits.
Industries worldwide are ushering in an era that requires minimal human intervention. This frees up humans to perform cognitive tasks and guide the automated technology, instead of manually performing them. The reduced dependency on humans creates a paradigm shift in the way large companies work.
First, humans are no longer needed to physically be present in a workspace and can work remotely, saving huge investments in infrastructure, as well as lowering emissions.
Second, humans are reskilled to think digital-first, thereby revolutionising the core understanding of business and how tasks should be performed and changing the way they work – from small changes like digitising record-keeping and going paperless, to big changes like implementing efficient energy sources in the office.
Third, automation increases efficiency across departments, sometimes even doubling the output in much shorter deadlines, essentially doing more work in a shorter time span. All of this combines to propel businesses towards their net zero goals.
Distributing the responsibility of creating a widescale social impact
It is also important to keep in mind that while net zero might look like an organisation-level goal when companies talk about individual targets, it is notably much larger than that. Achieving true net zero goes beyond organisations and industries and includes entire economies and the entire world.
Both developed and developing economies bear the responsibility to reduce carbon emissions to ensure sustainable growth. Developed nations can also work with developing economies to support their growth and share resources to help them meet targets. Once the responsibility of achieving global net zero is shared, automation can be implemented across economies to help reach this goal efficiently.
Scott Hunter, vice president for Strategic Engagements and Transformation Lead for APJ at UiPath
