Process automation leads to productivity gains

How to improve on current operations in established companies? How to bring greater efficiency in production chains that have been along for many years? What role do novel technologies such as artificial intelligence play in process automation and productivity gains? CEO and founder of Zappy.ai, Ambuj Agrawal, and myself addressed this and more in a recent conversation.

Introducing Ambug Agrawal, a startup founder and process automation from India and the UK

Ambuj Agrawal is an innovator from India and world leading expert in Artificial Intelligence and Process Automation. He has received numerous innovation awards from Citibank, Imperial College London, Ministry of Justice UK, Bristol University, among others. He is also one of the youngest recipients of the “Exceptional Talent Visa in Digital Technology” by the UK Government for expertise in Compiler Design and Machine Learning.

While completing his studies in computer science he cofounded two startups.

• The first one targeted the med tech space dealt with pulmonary disease. The startup was acquired by diagnostic company.
• The second startup had a harder time to scale.

Later on Ambuj decided to get a job at Citibank. There, he was very much in charge of different aspects in the data management space. He realized that he was doing many repetitive tasks, manually and that this was very time-consuming. 

The story of Zappy.ai starts with Ambuj being his own client and spotting repetitive manual tasks for automation

As he noticed that many of his colleagues were also conducting these repetitive tasks, he decided to create a startup meant to automate a number of data-related processes.

Choosing the processes to automate

He also noted that established companies tend to decide upon which process to automate based on a top-down approach. But Ambuj devised a solution that looks at how users are allocating their time and what processes they are conducting on a day-to-day basis. Based on their observed behavior on a desktop, Ambuj is able to identify the processes that are most used throughout the organization and therefore spot those that ought to be automated first. This is very much a bottom-up approach and proves to be much more time-saving than the top-down approach.

Zappy.ai’s clients include the CIO, the automation head and process owners 

Established companies have a complex decision-making process and, Ambuj is in regular interactions with chief information officers, automation heads, and process owners. 

CIOs want better data to make improved ROI-led decisions

The chief information officer looks to a solution to improve data quality and data management helping him make better informed decisions on projects that ought to be implemented based on their return on investment. The idea here is that it’s the quality of. The idea here is that data quality is critical to calculating the return on investment on every single project in the portfolio and therefore select those offering promising returns.

Automation heads look for the right processes to improve

Automation heads tend to be overburdened as many people throughout the organization reach out to them to automate their process. They didn’t don’t know where to start! And yet Ambuj’s solution is providing grounds of information as to which processes are the most useful throughout the organization.

Process owners seek greater efficiency 

Finally, process owners are always trying to bring greater efficiency in their processes and automation is clearly an improvement factor.

So that’s how process automation leads productivity gains. You can find much more right here!