Connecting Your Digital Life with Intelligent Automation

Krista White: Thanks, Francis, for sitting down with us here at Driven. So in your session today, you spoke about how people are connecting their digital lives through intelligent automation. Can you give us a summary of what you mean by intelligent automation and people's digital lives?

Francis Carden: Well the session really covered that off, like it was amazing because intelligent automation means a lot of things to a lot of different people. And so there's different definitions.

Francis Carden: So DPA, digital process automation is one. Digital ops is another term, integrated automation, digital transformation. I mean, what is the term? So I try to cover that off first because at the end of the day, people are looking at tactical solutions, like RPA, as standalone intelligent automation.

Francis Carden: And of course, that's not what it is. And so I tried to give a real life view of how customers have embraced more of the intelligent automation side of this, which is all of those things, which I described as the sum of many parts.

Francis Carden: So it's not RPA and it's not low code and it's not case management. It's all of these things as a collective. And then when you put AI and machine learning in amongst that, you truly can start to revolutionize the way your applications are built internally and how you serve customers.

Krista White: So how are you seeing people actually bring together digital process automation and robotic process automation and artificial intelligence and all of these different pieces? How are you seeing people actually do this in real life?

Francis Carden: So the way we talk about this is that, if you think about yourself as a business, you're trying to solve a problem. And if you look at the thing holistically, you're never gonna solve world peace, right?

Francis Carden: So we try to get customers to focus on a particular journey for their customers. So let's just say, it's to onboard a new customer to open a new account or to upgrade their phone.

Francis Carden: Take each of those as a separate journey. And instead of them having to call somebody up to do that or go into a bank, let's think about that digital process. What's the ideal outcome that you want for your customer, where they're going to go, "Wow, I'd like to do business with you and continue to do business with you."

Francis Carden: So we do those, we look at those journeys and we map those out and then we use the low code technology throughout case management, to start building this application really, really quickly.

Francis Carden: So show the business what they'll get in that first week, two weeks and say, "This is what we're going to build for you, is this right?" No, We need to tweak it a little bit and literally go live within 30 days, each journey at a time.

Krista White: And so you're looking at these existing journeys and just transforming them into digital journeys?

Francis Carden: Correct. Yes. And it's almost like, think of it this way, we try and get the customer to think about the perfect outcome first, for that particular journey.

Francis Carden: Once you got that outcome in mind and say, "This is Nirvana, this is what Nirvana looks like." You don't always get there, but you take a step back, map out what that perfect journey would look like to get to the perfect outcome.

Francis Carden: And then you start working on that. You don't have to think about the big picture. Integration can be dealt with with RPA or APIs. The user interface, worry about that later because you might want to work on an iPhone and an Android, but Motorola may come back with a new operating system.

Francis Carden: You shouldn't have to build a system specifically what we call silos. We need to stop building in these individual silos because we don't know what we're going to want tomorrow, but the outcome should always be perfect.

Krista White: I hear Blackberry is making a comeback and I'm very excited.

Francis Carden: I know. Well, we're ready for it when it does.

Krista White: Well, thanks for sitting down with us. You can catch a replay of Francis' keynote here on this channel or more Francis Carden in general, if you subscribe.

Francis Carden: Great. Thanks. Thanks, Krista.