Hyperautomation – why is it important?

Across industries globally, efficiency has bubbled up as a top need for organizations to save money, boost productivity, and grow revenue while improving customer experience. Business leaders are looking at automation and AI to help them achieve this. By leveraging these advanced technologies, companies can optimize their operations and stay competitive in the evolving market landscape.

According to a survey conducted by PagerDuty, 76% of respondents report that their company is pursuing automation of IT and/or business operations workflows and 71% of respondents said that their company is looking to expand investments in AI and machine learning in the next year.

But knowing where to invest can be difficult, especially when working with bleeding-edge technology and slogging through jargon and buzzwords. One of the top terms that customers often use when approaching PagerDuty is hyperautomation. Yet, how these customers define it often differs from team to team, and even more so from organization to organization.

Let’s cover what hyperautomation is and how you might break it down into its core components so you can see how your IT organizations might incorporate elements into your strategic roadmap.

What is Hyperautomation?

Hyperautomation is one of the loftiest goals for IT and beyond for most organizations. The premise is simple: automate everything that can be automated within a business for complete reduction of toil and unnecessary human involvement. Yet, how this term is defined often differs from team to team, and even more so from organization to organization.

The role of AI in hyperautomation

Hyperautomation differs from traditional automation in that it uses machine learning, AI, and robotic process automation (RPA) to analyze data, identify patterns, and make better-informed decisions. The current market size for hyperautomation sits at nearly $13 million and is expected to grow to $32 million by 2029, according to Mordor Intelligence. Hyperautomation technology, including event intelligence and workflow automation, helps businesses drive efficiency by integrating AI to enhance and expand automation capabilities. That said, this is a broad categorization of automation and AI working in conjunction to help businesses drive operational efficiency and improve decision-making processes.

The role of AI in hyperautomation is clear: it enables systems to handle complex tasks that were previously dependent on human intelligence. By using predictive analytics, natural language processing, and intelligent decision-making, AI allows hyperautomation to go beyond simple rule-based automation.

Examples of hyperautomation

Putting hyperautomation into practice requires breaking down types of automation into definable, measurable chunks and understanding when and where AI fits into the picture. Below are the types of automation that PagerDuty considers to be the backbone of a hyperautomation strategy.

Event-driven automation

Event-driven automation is automation that is kick-started at the event level, normalizing and enriching data at ingest. This automation can transform event data into a more understandable format that helps responders get up to speed faster during an incident. It can also jumpstart the incident response process, ensuring that event data is created as an alert and routed to the correct team with added context. For more advanced implementations, this automation kicks off automated diagnostics or even auto-remediation where an issue is resolved before it ever becomes an incident.

One of the most tangible ways to employ this is in the Operations Center. Operations Centers are often bogged down with toil and noise. It’s impossible to know what’s going wrong, what needs to be addressed, and what the context is. With event-driven automation, Operations Centers can automate responses to common problems or use machines as the first line of defense to add context and send pertinent issues to the right team at the right time, reducing customer impact.

Human-in-the-middle automation

Despite the lofty goals of hyperautomation and the rise of GenAI, some processes are necessary to delegate to humans. But it’s key not to lose sight of automation opportunities when humans are involved. In fact, this is a great opportunity to build in human-in-the-middle automation, where machines do the work until a human is needed and then act as a support system to kick off more automation as the person takes action.  This entire process is essential when managing the lifecycle of an incident. In an automated incident management approach, automation and humans, supported by guided remediation that assigns roles and tasks, work in concert to resolve incidents quickly. Augmenting this process with a GenAI assistant can drive further efficiencies.

This type of automation is especially useful during major incidents where automation surfaces critical issues and provides context to responders, then kicks off automated workflows based on incident types that help prescribe designated responder actions so that no critical steps are missed and SLAs are met. For instance, in an automated incident management system, AI can analyze incident data, suggest remedial actions, and coordinate human responses, streamlining the entire resolution process.

IT process automation

Not every issue is urgent. Some types of work, like tickets for internal IT processes, can have completion time measured by multi-day SLAs rather than minutes or seconds. However, these processes are still critical to the way a business functions. They provide great opportunities for automation. Machines can often handle these processes entirely without human intervention.

This is especially true when considering routing tasks like deploying a virtual machine (VM). Without automation, this process includes lots of idle time. The employee that requested the VM waits for the request to be completed and the person who is assigned the ticket works through their ticket queue. Most organizations operate this way because different teams, systems, and environments are disconnected and each team has its own operating processes that require experts to use and complete. With multi-step processes, this can equate to a lot of idle time. But the task itself often only takes a few minutes. With IT process automation, organizations can digitize this task and delegate it for use, minimizing errors and removing idle time, saving days of waiting for ticket completion.

Business workflow automation

Automation opportunities exist outside of IT as well. Oftentimes business workflow automation is used by other functions like finance, sales, and marketing to improve their efficiency. While these teams may not be the builders of the automation, they can see huge productivity gains that extend across the business. It’s a great opportunity for IT leaders to bridge cross-functional gaps and drive results across the organization.

There are also business processes related to IT that are valuable to automate. Often IT processes include technical and human-driven steps. Business workflow automation helps automate the manual human-driven work that crosses people, teams, and systems. For example: infrastructure upgrades. The upgrade process might need things like gathering approvals, making decisions, or providing updates. Rather than manually completing these steps, organizations can streamline the process using business workflow automation. The result is huge productivity gains. Businesses can supercharge the value of business workflow automation by blending IT process automation to automate complex. 

Setting realistic expectations

Hyperautomation is a marathon, not a sprint. Those interested in charting a course for hyperautomation in the enterprise should be thinking about how to phase out the approach. By embedding these types of automation into company processes and workflows, IT leaders can start sharing tangible success metrics and boosting departmental productivity. To get started, consider which processes take the most time for teams today. Balance that against the ease of implementation. Are there some low-hanging fruits in your ecosystem that you could automate? For most of our customers, the answer is yes. Once you identify and automate that toil from your workflow, you can scale these learnings to more complex processes.

If you are looking for a partner in your journey towards hyperautomation, the PagerDuty Operations Cloud has a best-in-class automation solution that can help you standardize across the organization while driving high ROI and better customer experience. To learn more, reach out to our team today.