AI and low-code development top hot BPM trends — Valutrics

Meanwhile, Forrester’s Koplowitz said BPM is in the throes of an “extreme makeover,” in which artificial intelligence (AI) is being brought into the fold to enhance automation and help better serve customers. He argued that AI is being used in BPM in three key areas: Process optimization through machine learning, augmenting humans with new sources of cognitive expertise and deploying new user interfaces. He further argued that BPM systems have been good at automating structured processes, but AI technologies such as natural language processing and sentiment analysis can help to interpret intent from unstructured data sources.

Telecommunications and IT network management is all about automation and intelligence — insights derived from analytics and AI to make the network more adaptable with greater capacity, lower costs and flexibility to support more advanced services — Fox said. Essentially, the network is the foundation for digital transformation, he noted. And BPM will continue to improve the network to enable the support of expanding digital operations throughout the enterprise. “Our MetTel Labs teams are experimenting further ways of enhancing our BPM platform with artificial intelligence through the expanding use of bots and deeper applications such as IBM Watson,” Fox said.

Meanwhile, Paul Daugherty, chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture, said, “We believe that AI is the most transformative technology since the dawn of the information age. Artificial intelligence and new forms of automation are giving us new ways to create agility inside business processes.”

Amit Rajaram, director of Pega solutions at Telerx, said BPM trends have taken the technology far from where he was when he started 10 years ago with the title of director of BPM and workflow. “In the past few years,” he observed, “BPM has evolved to take on many more nuances and facets, including things like advanced analytics, decisioning, AI, machine learning, natural language processing and enhanced styles of reporting. There are so many more things you can do with what was traditionally nothing more than a workflow optimization engine with bells and whistles. It’s not just about automating tasks and reducing costs.”

In addition, BPM vendors and end users are beginning to enable voice and chat interactions with business processes and the systems that manage them. Because of digital technologies, such as the internet of things, AI, machine learning, virtual assistants and conversational platforms, there is so much more information to tap into in real time, said Samantha Searle, a Gartner analyst specializing in BPM.

“Therefore, there are huge opportunities to design more intelligent processes that can take advantage of all this real-time information and analytics and have more automated decision-making,” Searle explained. “So, there’s an opportunity to design more important processes.”