Nordic Companies Warm to Automation as Platforms Evolve
Labor costs, digital transformations spark enterprises’ interest in increasingly intelligent, AI-powered tools, ISG Provider Lens™ report says
Enterprise use of AI-powered automation platforms has soared over the past year in the Nordics, although challenges to enterprise and public sector adoption remain, according to a new research report published today by Information Services Group (ISG), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.
The 2022 ISG Provider Lens™ Intelligent Automation — Platforms and Products report for the Nordics finds that the recent surge in adoption has been triggered by several converging factors. The high cost of labor in the Nordics has generated demand for automation to replace some tasks, while enterprises are also embracing the new technologies to ensure employee well-being and productivity as they ask team members to return to the office. These trends are accelerating against the backdrop of a general move toward enterprise digital transformation across the Nordics and other developed regions.
“Enterprises have many service providers to choose from that can help them integrate these tools into their systems and processes.”
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“Intelligent automation is meeting emerging needs at companies in the Nordics, especially large enterprises,” said Chip Wagner, CEO, ISG Automation. “The region is embracing these technologies as they mature and begin to deliver on their promise.”
Adoption varies across industries and countries in the region, the report says. Financial services and retail enterprises are leading the way toward automation in the Nordics, while public sector organizations that rely heavily on on-premises solutions are moving more slowly. Multinational firms based in the Nordics are on par with other global enterprises, while Finnish and Norwegian companies are also quickly adopting automation and Swedish enterprises are increasing their investments.
Intelligent automation is based on three core platforms that have grown far more capable in recent years, the report says. Conversational AI is increasingly focused on enabling seamless omnichannel experiences that combine voice, text and other modes of synchronous and asynchronous interaction. Intelligent document processing (IDP), once limited to optical character recognition, now offers the ability to scan documents and extract and analyze information at scale. Process discovery and task mining tools can identify more complex workflows and human tasks within business processes, which helps organizations determine where intelligent automation platforms can be most effective.
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These platforms are now being combined for even greater impact, ISG says. For example, by both digitizing and analyzing records with IDP and understanding operations through process discovery, service providers and enterprises can implement more effective robotic process automation (RPA) initiatives.
“Increasingly sophisticated automation platforms can be deployed more effectively than ever to meet real-world business objectives,” said Jan Erik Aase, partner and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research. “Enterprises have many service providers to choose from that can help them integrate these tools into their systems and processes.”
The report also explores other intelligent automation trends affecting the Nordics, including growing demand for automated sentiment analysis and ongoing debates about how much automation development should be performed by team members who are not professional developers.
The 2022 ISG Provider Lens™ Intelligent Automation — Platforms and Products report for the Nordics evaluates the capabilities of 50 providers across three quadrants: Conversational AI Platforms, Intelligent Document Processing, and Process Discovery and Mining.
The report names UiPath as a Leader in two quadrants. It names ABBYY, Amelia, Artificial Solutions, Celonis, Google Dialogflow, Kofax, Microsoft and QPR Software as Leaders in one quadrant each.
In addition, Boost.ai is named as a Rising Star — a company with a “promising portfolio” and “high future potential” by ISG’s definition — in one quadrant.
