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New report reveals CIOs have a key role in demonstrating value and becoming champions of intelligent automation.

UiPath this week published the findings of a report based on interviews with enterprise CIOs in Europe. UIPath is a leading enterprise automation software company.

The study finds that hybrid work, increasing demands from customers, and challenges from new competition are driving organizations to automation-first strategies. These use robotic process automation (RPA), AI, and low-code and no-code tools.

The CIONET report, Towards The Fully Automated Enterprise™, seeks to understand CIOs’ role in orchestrating the reinvention of business and the redesign of work.

CIOs: Pandemic drove implementation of automation

CIOs reported the significant changes caused by the pandemic on business practices are resulting in implementations of enterprise automation. These are to achieve replacement of legacy systems with modern solutions (29%). They are also for comprehensive process reengineering (26%), and elimination of repetitive work with RPA (24%).

The report says that the benefits of intelligent automation accrue only to those companies whose CIOs become sponsors of innovation. They also need to involve the IT organization as early as possible.

The CIOs said intelligent automation will play a key role in levelling the playing field between incumbents and digital leaders. This effect will happen over the next five years, they say.

According to the report, leading CIOs are currently using software robots to assist or remove employees from low-value, repetitive tasks. They are also redesigning mission-critical business workflows and, in some cases, adopting new business models.

Respondents shared that currently, the adoption of automation is still at an early stage of maturity,. There is a lot of potential remaining untapped, they say. Deployment strategies include applying short-term fixes to reduce costs and speed up critical processes. They are also adopting an evolutionary approach and saving major disruption while generating business benefits. Finally, some are taking radical action such as replacing legacy systems entirely or adopting new solution models.

CIOs play a pivotal role in driving the adoption of intelligent automation across the enterprise. The CIOs surveyed have achieved successful cloud and mobile platform migrations. They now believe that automation is going to become “their next big thing.”