Software originated as a tool to expand what humans could do.
With the rise of computers, people gained abilities that wouldn’t have been possible before. They could work faster, process more data, and communicate in new ways. However, as the volume of software we rely on daily has ballooned, it’s clear that software too often creates as much work as it solves.
Intelligent automation helps us fill those gaps.
This is the next step in software gaining the ability to complete tasks as well as—or better—than a human can. Using this technology, we can relieve the most repetitive, tedious, and inefficient parts of work.
Intelligent automation happens when time-tested automation meets AI’s new capabilities for analysis, decision-making, and content generation. This makes it possible to automate a much broader range of human work than we could before. As a result, businesses can use their teams more effectively, seeing productivity and revenue gains and taking the tedious parts of work off their people.
“How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity?
In three words: deep learning worked.
In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.”
- Sam Altman, The Intelligence Age
What is intelligent automation?
Intelligent automation (IA) combines artificial intelligence (AI) with automation technologies to automate complex workflows, streamline tasks, and improve decision-making. While businesses have been using different types of business process automation for decades, the added capabilities offered by AI will allow them to automate processes across a much wider variety of tasks.
Part of the reason for this is that intelligent automation is able to cut out a lot of the work that would typically have to have been done at the beginning and end of each task and makes it much easier to digitize data from paper documents and images.
With IA, entire processes can be completed automatically from beginning to end since AI is seamlessly integrated into a workflow. It requires less human intervention and can be significantly more impactful for businesses.
"For all the work that current software can handle, there are orders of magnitude more work that it cannot: work that is being done via pen and paper, spreadsheets, phone calls, and fax.
- Kimberley Tan, RIP to RPA: The Rise of Intelligent Automation (Andreessen Horowitz)
The benefits of intelligent automation
Intelligent automation can provide a few key benefits for the businesses deploying it. These can include:
Increased efficiency and productivity: By automating repetitive tasks, IA frees up employees to focus on more valuable, strategic work. This leads to better productivity and allows businesses to accomplish more with the same resources.
Cost reduction: IA optimizes workflows across an organization, leading to substantial cost savings and a quicker return on investment. It can also enable businesses to scale operations efficiently without increasing expenses.
Improved accuracy and quality: Automation reduces the risk of human errors, ensuring greater accuracy in data entry and other processes. This leads to improved data quality across systems and more reliable outputs.
Better customer experience: IA enables faster response times, greater accuracy, and more consistent results in customer-facing work, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Better decision-making: By connecting and integrating various systems, IA enables better data capture and retrieval, allowing businesses to make more informed and timely decisions.
Increased adaptability and operational agility: IA solutions are designed to scale while maintaining security and compliance standards, helping businesses handle unstructured data and adapt to changing conditions.
These benefits collectively contribute to streamlined operations, improved operational excellence, and increased competitiveness for businesses implementing intelligent automation solutions.
Marketing agency Mintleads is an example of a business that has used intelligent automation to scale by 1,500% in just a year and a half. They use an AI agent to support their sales team by pulling prospect info, summarizing call notes, and generating a pre-written pitch that shows up as a draft in their inbox. All the salesperson has to do is review and send. Prospects get detailed pitches extremely quickly while the call is still fresh in their minds. Their sales team saves hours of work every day, meaning they can put many more calls on their calendar—which translates directly to more opportunities for revenue.
Will intelligent automation replace people?
The goal of intelligent automation is to boost business outcomes. This technology can help businesses become more productive with the same number of people, increasing opportunities for revenue and growth as well as savings.
It’s possible that intelligent automation can completely replace people in certain workflows or roles, especially those that are extremely rote and predictable. However, “autonomous process automation” isn’t the primary goal, or even an especially desirable one for most businesses.
In practicality, most processes will still need—and want—a human in the loop. Intelligent automation augments human labor, helping them work faster and accomplish more. The most common situation will involve an AI agent or workflow that efficiently completes the most repetitive and time-consuming parts of work and then delivers it to a person to validate the results.
This type of automated process will help employees focus more on the core elements of their jobs that really do require human insight, experience, and skill. Removing repetitive work can even increase workers' job satisfaction and improve their effectiveness in their roles.
Where businesses can use intelligent automation tools
Intelligent automation tools are flexible by nature and can be adapted to fit many types of processes within a business. There are a few key areas where IA can have an especially high impact on efficiency and productivity for business:
Data entry and document processing: IA can process documents and automate data entry tasks, reducing manual work and errors.
Customer service interactions: AI-driven chatbots can handle customer queries, provide quick responses, and resolve issues without human intervention.
Workflow automation: IA can streamline business processes by automating repetitive tasks in sales, support, IT, and marketing.
Data analysis and insights: IA tools can collect and assess unstructured data, generate predictive analytics, and provide valuable business insights.
Sales and marketing optimization: IA can assist in lead scoring, A/B testing, real-time product recommendations, and customer sentiment analysis.
Financial operations: IA can automate financial logging, detect fraud in bank transactions, and streamline procurement processes.
Human resources management: IA can help with hiring, processing time-off requests, payroll administration, and enable better workforce planning.
Supply chain management: IA can analyze historical data and market trends to forecast demand and manage inventory more effectively.
Regulatory compliance: IA can assist in storing and managing documents to meet regulatory requirements across many industries.
Process optimization: Machine learning algorithms in IA systems can continuously learn from data and suggest improvements to workflows over time.
Learn how an AI development agency is helping businesses automate
Read the interviewHow intelligent automation works
Intelligent automation isn’t just one specific technology. It’s actually a blend of multiple, incorporating many recent tech advancements. Here are some of the key elements involved:
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) uses software robots called “bots” to complete repetitive tasks. Most businesses use RPA for more predictable processes like data entry, invoice processing, or report generation. RPA isn’t great for tasks that require a lot of complex analysis or decision-making. Newer RPA approaches that use more AI can also be referred to as intelligent process automation (IPA).
Natural language processing (NLP) is what allows AI to understand and replicate human language. Intelligent automation can use NLP to read and summarize meeting notes or to generate emails to clients.
Optical character recognition (OCR) is used to extract text from paper documents or images of text. Using OCR, an intelligent automation tool can take a photo of a contract, digitize it, and then sort and process the data.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables software to replicate human intelligence in order to understand unstructured data, make decisions, and generate content. It is developed using Machine Learning (ML) to train AI models that ingest and learn from huge quantities of training data.
The two main forms of AI that will come into play for intelligent automation are Generative AI and Agentic AI, also known as agentic workflows. Generative AI is the splashy AI we all know and love. It can create text, images, music, and even video. Agentic AI is more process-based. It focuses on objectives to be accomplished and will analyze input, perform actions, sort data, make decisions, and solve problems to achieve those goals.
If you think of an AI tool like an intern, a generative AI tool is more of a design student who can come up with creative output based on your instructions. An agentic AI tool, such as an AI agent, is more similar to an apprentice who hands you the tools you need the instant you need them and clears off your workspace, supporting you so you can put 100% of your focus into the core parts of your work.
Intelligent automation tools and technologies
When it’s time to start deploying intelligent automation, businesses can approach their technology choices in a few different ways. Intelligent automation is still a very new field and new tools are launching every day. Many businesses are likely to use a combination of approaches to address different needs.
These are the main ways businesses can deploy intelligent automation currently:
Develop AI tools from scratch
Larger enterprises with the resources available can use developers to code their own intelligent automation systems. Coding from scratch allows businesses to tailor their tools to hyper-specific needs and ensure the highest level of privacy for their business data. This form of development is slow and expensive. Even large companies will face limitations in the development talent they have available, so this will typically only be a practical choice for very labor-intensive business-critical tasks.
Build intelligent automation tools with a no code platform
Businesses can build fully custom intelligent automation tools using a no code platform like Glide. These tools can be tailored to your business’s specific needs, with AI and automation incorporated strategically into them. This could look like anything from a CRM that automatically generates sales pitches (like the Mintleads example above) to a mobile field inspections app that uses AI to automate notetaking in the field.
No code is faster and takes less labor than traditional development. This makes it a great option for fast-moving industries and businesses without a lot of engineering resources. Larger enterprises with engineering teams may also choose to custom code core tooling and use no code to supplement, creating productivity tools for smaller teams and specific needs across the company.
Use integrations to incorporate AI and automation into existing tools
At the simplest level, you can create your own intelligent automation workflows by integrating an automation platform like Zapier or Make with a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT and connecting them to the other software you use for work. This technique will be limited in scope, but it’s a great way to incorporate intelligent automation into existing platforms or processes with minimal disruption.
Take advantage of new AI features in existing software
Many existing software platforms are launching AI features that enable intelligent automation within their ecosystems. If your business relies on a specific piece of software—a project management system, CRM, HR solution, etc—that platform’s native IA features can help work more efficiently within that platform. Businesses should evaluate new AI features introduced by their existing software vendors to see if they suit their needs.
Deploy AI agents to solve specific problems
AI agents are the targeted specialists of intelligent automation. They are designed to fix specific bottlenecks or improve critical parts of a business’s processes. Because AI agents are so targeted, they are often the easiest way to start using intelligent automation. They can be deployed for a specific use without requiring businesses to overhaul their entire system. Agents can be integrated into existing tech stacks to relieve labor-intensive tasks without disrupting operations.
Businesses can purchase off-the-shelf agents designed for common labor-intensive tasks like invoice processing or resume screening. You can also quickly develop your own customized agents with the help of no code developers who can tailor agents to fit your unique workflows. A skilled Glide developer can spin up an agent in under a week, and most will end up developing a suite of agents for a business, each designed to address a specific issue.
How you can use AI to speed up human work
What are AI agents?Intelligent automation can help businesses stay competitive
AI may be a new technology, but it’s increasingly clear that it’s here to stay. Study after study is predicting generative AI will have a huge impact on productivity across all sectors of the economy. However, the supporting tools and technologies to help businesses actually deploy AI are still trying to catch up.
Intelligent automation is the best way for businesses of all sizes to apply AI in a practical and effective way. The businesses that don’t put energy into deploying AI will inevitably fall behind as their competitors figure out how to become more productive with AI.
The good news is that most leaders already know where intelligent automation is needed. If you ask anyone with responsibility over a process where the pain is, they’ll easily rattle off a list. These are the pains that can be alleviated with intelligent automation tools. Smart businesses will be taking advantage of the pinpointed relief offered by AI agents, platforms that introduce AI to become easier to use, and business-wide custom-built automation tools.
