“Everyone within Publicis becomes a data analyst, engineer, and intelligence partner, with all the information needed to drive growth for our clients at their fingertips.”
Publicis Groupe made a bold statement last week with a press release and presentation celebrating its achievements over the past year “after transitioning from a holding company to a platform” and charting the company’s future direction in the age of AI.
Now, if you’re raising a skeptical eyebrow at this claim, you’re probably in good company with most of the people I shared this claim with on LinkedIn and this artist formerly known as Twitter. But if it were the third largest in the world, Owned by agency Platform companies may not be able to paint a bold picture, but they will be concerned about their core competencies.
But the thing is, directionally, I think they’re right.
The release of Workato’s 2024 Business Automation and AI Index report earlier this week provided empirical evidence to support that vision. Workato is a leading enterprise automation company providing a low-code/no-code (LCNC) platform for automating processes and workflows across the technology stack. (Disclosure: I am their advisor and co-author of their CEO’s new book, The New Automation Mindset.. )
They used anonymized data sampled over 36 months from 1,055 customers on their platform to get an accurate picture of what companies are automating (over 82,000 automations). We investigated). But perhaps even more noteworthy is that who We’re building automation for them.
In my opinion, the big discoveries are: 44% of all automated processes are built outside of IT.
Business operations teams (marketing ops, sales ops, revop, etc.) build 27% of all these automations. Non-IT project managers, product managers, and app administrators (looking at you CRM administrators) should build an additional 10%. And then there’s another 7% of “other” builders. I think this is a power user within a company. (He has two of them on the Partnerships team at HubSpot, where he also uses Workato, and it’s amazing what they can do.)
It’s also worth noting that these non-IT builders (who are subject matter experts but not IT experts, at least organizationally) aren’t just automating simple processes within their jobs. To do. They are also working on complex automation.
“Scores 1-3 are simple point-to-point integrations with steps 1-4. They contain no logic and interconnect simple SaaS applications. Complex processes (4-6) Includes conditional rules, logic, loops, data transformations, and cross-referencing data. In some cases, batch processing may be required. Very complex processes can include SaaS, on-premises, ERP, It includes a combination of enterprise applications, often 30 or more steps that include conditional rules, advanced transformations, human participation, and more.”
Now I know there are some Cynic There are skeptics who believe that using LCNC tools by non-IT people is a recipe for disaster. When implementing digital operations within a business function, there can be a lively debate about the relative value of domain expertise versus IT expertise. But instead of rhetoric, let’s look at data.
If a business team deploying its own automation is going to cause a train wreck, expect it to show up in the first year, when business builders are least experienced. At least for the first few years, right? Things will go pear-shaped and the CIO will throw down the hammer and say, “Look at the mess these amateurs have caused!” we are taking over. ”
But the data shows otherwise. Quite the opposite. On average, after 31% of automation is built by the business in the first year, organizations lean more toward that model, and in the second year, it is 41% built by the business. By the third year, that number is up to 48%.
Please note that this is not IT versus A business situation where different parties are using competing tools. These are all integrated on one common platform (a typical example of a workflow layer aggregation platform), most often owned by IT. Empowering these business teams is part of your IT strategy.
“IT is evolving into a player-coach role,” says Workato. “While 56% of automation is still built by IT personnel, IT is also responsible for governance and guidance for the 44% that falls to business teams. ”.
Can we strengthen the expertise of both? and Is good IT governance harmonized? The evidence here suggests that yes.
What’s really interesting about this? This multi-year data from Workato only includes the impact of generative AI at the end of the period analyzed. Last year, the company released Natural Language Co-Pilot to further empower builders, as well as a governance framework and an academy course to teach it. He said the empirical impact will be clear a year from now, but there is no doubt that we will see an acceleration in both full automation and the rate of business-driven automation.
Speaking of generative AI, the Workato report also includes interesting data on where organizations are incorporating generative AI into their automation.
48% of use cases are in revenue operations, with an additional 12% for customer support and operations. The most common of these use cases are those using conversational intelligence, such as summaries, thoughts, and next steps. These are some of the most time-consuming and error-prone manual aspects of managing customer journeys. Intelligent automation here is clearly a huge benefit for both businesses and their customers.
So let’s go back to where we started with Publicis’ bold aspirations.
In fact, companies are rapidly increasing the scale and complexity of their digital operations. A growing number of people outside of IT can now shape and adapt the part of digital operations closest to their work. While the Workato report does not directly address democratizing analytics, many of its use cases include intelligently distributing data to enable more context-specific analysis. . While not every employee may become a data analyst, there is no doubt that more people will be able to use self-service analytics productively at work.
Indeed, the laws of martech still apply. Leveraging the innovations enabled by this technology will require a significant amount of difficult organizational change. But that’s why now is a great time to get into martech and marketing.