Contribution of digital workers to increase by 50% in two years

These results, from a survey of 500 senior decision-makers in large enterprises, illustrate a fundamental shift to a future of work dependent on human-machine collaboration.

“A growing number of employees will find themselves working side-by-side with a digital coworker in the future as technology automates many work activities,” commented Holly Muscolino, Research Vice President of Content and Process Strategies and the Future of Work at IDC. “Think human and machine. The human-machine collaboration is not just the future of work, but it is the new normal for today's high performing enterprises.”

It is not just mundane, repetitive jobs like data input that new digital colleagues will help human workers complete in the years ahead. The growth of machine learning (ML) through human-centric AI means robot assistants will also help employees make better decisions.

In most cases, these technologies enhance rather than replace human capabilities. For example, the survey found that technology evaluating information will grow by 28% in two years, and 18% of activities related to reasoning and decision making will be performed by machines.

IDC forecasts that the Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) software market, which includes content intelligence and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), will grow from $13.1bn in 2019 to $20.7bn in 2023.

Since many of the repetitive processes and tasks that are well suited for automation by RPA are document and content centric, content intelligence technologies frequently go hand-in-hand with RPA in intelligent process automation use cases.

Automation initiatives will also be enabled by process intelligence, a new generation of process mining tools providing complete visibility into business processes - the critical foresight needed to improve the success of an IPA project.

Over 40% of survey respondents have experienced a notable increase in customer satisfaction and employee productivity by deploying content intelligence technologies into their digital transformation strategy.

Additionally, more than 1/3 of respondents saw an improvement in responsiveness to customers, new product or revenue opportunities, increased visibility and/or accountability, or increased customer engagement.

“The IDC survey proves that automation can and should be human-centric, augmented with artificial intelligence,” said Neil Murphy, VP Global Business Development at ABBYY. “Ethical, responsible automation will create a more productive, happier future where human workers can focus on higher level, creative and socially responsible tasks, and customers get better experiences with faster service. Businesses that are early-adopters of incorporating content intelligence within their automation platforms will gain a significant competitive edge.”

Other key findings:

• The shift toward human-machine collaboration is presenting new challenges:
• 75% of respondents said their organisation was finding it difficult to recruit digital skills
• Over 20% cited inadequate worker skills and/or training
• The top three corporate initiatives enabled by content intelligence are employee engagement, customer engagement and digital transformation
• The top three applications that consume the data generated by content intelligence are customer relationship management, business intelligence and risk management
• The average expected increase in spending for content intelligence technologies over the next year is 31%

Survey methodology

IDC conducted a global survey of 500 senior influencers and/or decision-makers who were knowledgeable about how their organisation digitised, automated, and/or optimised content and document workflows with information technology products and services.

All organisations had deployed, or were planning to deploy, content intelligence technologies. Survey participants were from organisations with over 500 employees and were located in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Australia.

Respondents represented five industries: banking/investment, insurance, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).