Author: Babu Sivadasan

JIFFY.ai enables enterprises to become autonomous with intelligent automation, and achieve tomorrow’s possibilities today

Change happens. All the time. Faster than you think.

In the future, your organization will be able to sustain and thrive only if it’s ready to adapt on-the-fly.

These changes could be geopolitical, like the pandemic and global recession, or they could be societal, such as a change in consumer attitude.

When the industry undergoes rapid changes, customers and employees expect more contextualized and personalized experiences.

In these demanding circumstances, businesses that are still grappling with complex service and experience challenges invariably lag behind competition.

In a highly competitive, highly regulatory focused and ever-evolving industry like Financial Services, there are several dated, high-touch, manual processes.  Manual systems that deliver inconsistent responses slow problem resolution, and hinder service level agreement (SLA) management, tracking, control and governance can pull your business backward.

While gearing up for the future, organizations must be able to recognize the need for change and adapt dynamically — reassembling capabilities from inside and outside the enterprise.

Are you equipped to deliver innovation quickly in the wake of disruptions?

The current enterprise processes and business application portfolios were designed to address the challenges of the past. In the face of rapid changes, they become an obstacle to innovation. At the same time, you cannot rip and replace them due to the cost and risks involved.

So, how do you transform your organization for the emerging future?

According to Gartner, organizations need to evolve into ‘composable enterprises’ and adapt to changing business needs through the assembly and combination of packaged business capabilities.

Composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks. It is “being flexible, fluid, continuous, even improvisational — and it is how we will move forward,” says Don Scheibenreif, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner.

One of the key principles of composable businesses is achieving resilience through autonomy.

Now, what is an autonomous enterprise?

In his recent article in Forbes, Chris MacFarland, Executive Chairman & CTO of Masergy has defined the autonomous enterprise as a self-driving business that has applied artificial intelligence and automation to the problems of operations and management — one that is able to configure, monitor and maintain itself independently. Correspondingly, it’s capable of learning, adapting to changes and intelligently automating.

An autonomous enterprise can assemble, reassemble and extend business capabilities using applications that can be adapted to the changing needs of the business. With this agility, it can deliver more unique and customized experiences to users, and facilitate deeper collaboration between stakeholders.

In short, autonomous enterprises symbolize freedom.

Freedom from tedious manual operations. Freedom from inflexible bots. Freedom from the dependency on tech-heavy applications.

The agility of an autonomous enterprise depends mainly on its ability to scale business operations rapidly based on the need of the hour.

At the front-end, you need to empower the real business users to be able to bring in engaging customer experiences. JIFFY.ai enables such an experience with its intuitive no-code software and application development studio.

The next critical requirement is to make the middle-office and back-office processing autonomous. This is made possible by moving away from manual operational processes and embracing automation. And then employing artificial Intelligence and machine learning-based decision making to execute business functions on a dynamic basis and recognize events, patterns, anomalies, relationships as well as root causes.

You may exclaim, “All that sounds great, but today automation is seen as complex to execute and slow to show results”!

JIFFY.ai brings ultimate freedom to your enterprise.

We see automation through a new lens. We specialize in combining automation with contextual intelligence and enabling you to build highly specific solutions for your enterprise processes on our integrated intelligent automation platform.

The platform enables organizations to compose, configure, monitor and maintain themselves as autonomous enterprises. Enterprises will be able to assemble automated business capabilities that can learn and adapt to changing needs with little or no additional resource and operational expenditure.

It brings the powers of artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive document processing, natural language processing, no-code application development and workflows, and analytics to your business users. So, they can deliver end-to-end business process automations and lifecycle management solutions that boost efficiency, reduce OPEX costs, and ensure faster returns on investment.

It liberates your people from the tedium of manual processes. It gives them freedom to think faster. Freedom to create faster. Freedom to automate faster. And freedom to innovate faster.

For example, it can crawl through real-time customer interactions, incidents, workflows and procedures across multiple channels to quickly detect anomalies, issues, or preferences of the customer. Based on that data, it can proactively generate the best action to either resolve an issue or initiate recommendations before the customer even realizes they existed.

Or it can make the entire process of customer or employee onboarding seamless by collecting fresh data and suggesting the best choices for the new customers and employees.

It can also compile huge volumes of finance and accounting data and ensure real-time reconciliation—a complex operation that would otherwise keep your most valuable employees engaged for several days at the end of every month.

In fact, our intelligent automation platform brings out the best in your people and empowers them to achieve tomorrow’s possibilities today.

Partner with us to get a head start in building responsible enterprise autonomy.

Accelerate transformation with no-code automation. 

With COVID-19 causing risks to human health and disruption to our way of life in general, especially the way we work, companies have been forced to pursue alternate ways of making progress. Many of them are striving to use intelligent automation and AI to innovate their way forward while working safely from home.

This shift does not mean that we do not value human work, or the role people play in the enterprise. Think about the agricultural revolution. In the 18th century, people transitioned from hard laboring stationary farming to original inventions that altered the farming process. The new patterns of crop rotation and livestock utilization paved the way for better crop yields and the ability to support more animals. It was an opportunity to produce more, not a judgment of the reduced value of human work.

These agricultural changes impacted societies as there was a decline in both the intensity of the work and the number of farming laborers needed. Nevertheless, the positive effects of this disruption gave life to new technologies and opportunities as people migrated to the city to work in industrial jobs. As humans, it’s in our nature to innovate and create new solutions that become paramount to organizations and the people that work within them. We believe that as intelligent automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning continue to evolve, we have an opportunity to harness this energy of innovation in a whole new way.

Our mission is to enable organizations to cross the human machine divide that has existed since the introduction of machines and enable them to co-exist seamlessly. We aim to reduce the friction between the two in a natural, human-friendly way. Eliminating the need for expensive translation mechanisms in the form of data entry, data synchronization and mundane activities allows organizations to become extremely efficient and resilient. Enabling innovation within the enterprise using natural language instructions, we bring out the innovator in the everyday business user. By letting the machines understand human language to achieve automation we drive speed in business transformation previously not possible. This is the core of our perspective on automation.

For too long, enterprises have placed contradictory expectations on their most talented thought leaders and employees. We have expected people to be innovative while also weighing them down with administrative tasks. Research shows “task switching” disrupts flow of thought and creativity. Ultimately, we launched JIFFY.ai to reduce this phenomenon and to allow creativity to flourish and innovation to be unleashed in its most uninterrupted form. Our relentless commitment is to see a change in how organizations redesign their work, supporting them through the power that automation and AI offers to maximize strength, resiliency and scale.

Historically, automation was seen as a point solution for mundane actions. You gave it a specific function or set of functions, and it performed. Now, technology allows us to elevate and redefine the process and achieve progress through automation. This change is necessary in the ever-evolving landscape in which we live.

JIFFY.ai—a company that officially launched less than a year ago—is already a top-scoring disruptor in the Hyper Intelligent Automation (HIA) Breakout Zone, according to global management consulting and strategic advisory firm, Zinnov.

Zinnov regularly performs a comprehensive assessment of Hyper Intelligent Automation platforms as part of Zinnov Zones, an industry-leading annual rating of global technology service providers of cutting-edge technologies. For its 2021 report, Zinnov evaluated over 70 companies, including JIFFY.ai.

Zinnov closely examined JIFFY.ai technology for its technical prowess and scalability across multiple categories, including HIA, Use Case Discovery, Intelligent Document Processing, IT Automation, Intelligent Virtual Agent, F&A Automation, Customer Success Automation, and Talent Management Automation.

JIFFY.ai came out top-ranked in the Breakout Zone because our AI and ML-based platforms bring high-performance automation solutions to companies worldwide.

JIFFY.ai has come far in a short amount of time because we were founded to do things differently. We’re a newcomer in the marketplace, driven to disrupt the terrain of business automation with new ideas.

How HyperApps Leapfrog Other Automation Tech

The JIFFY.ai HyperApp approach leapfrogs past automation solutions such as RPA and SaaS-based point solutions for Business Process Management. (For a detailed rundown on how HyperApps excel in areas where RPA, SaaS-based point solutions, and hyperautomation don’t—read our post, From RPA to Hyperautomation to HyperApps: Level Up Automation Deployments in 2021.)

Zinnov looked at us closely and put JIFFY.ai at the top of its Breakout Zone because our unique approach allows businesses to combine the simplicity of low code with the power of intelligent automation, and the cost convenience of SaaS. Our HyperApps encapsulate all the various capabilities required to achieve successful business process automation—including designing, building, deploying, monitoring, and analyzing.

Our Invoice Processing HyperApp, for example, eliminates the roadblocks to maintaining frictionless cash flow by minimizing the risks and costs associated with inefficient processes. This HyperApp meets the complex technical and business requirements for seamless invoice processing—and then puts it in an easy-to-use, self-service application for business users, with no development team required.

Because our platform makes automation app development easier, we help businesses to avoid a common pitfall: With only technical users and data science professionals involved in automation development and deployment, there is a risk that real business requirements will get overlooked. HyperApps help to demystify the automation of complex business processes, simplifying deployment for business and technical users alike.

Most businesses silo their employees, which allows them to use and develop their specific expertise for the business’s success. This division is especially evident in software and technology areas: One employee may conceive a new idea but must rely on yet another employee to implement it due to a lack of specialized expertise.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this breakdown, it can lead to frustration for the idea’s creator. Creators of new ideas must spend a great deal of time and effort translating their thoughts to another group. Some things may get lost in translation, and often, this uphill climb means new concepts don’t come to fruition because the idea is too hard to enact, or too expensive, or too time-consuming.

With JIFFY.ai technology, it’s different: Ideas can be put into development more efficiently. Innovative power is easier to enact. Ideas come to fruition, and innovation moves forward.

When businesses use HyperApps developed on a single platform—rather than stitching together multiple technologies and vendors on their own—they’re able to structure their automation with reusable building blocks. These extensible and scalable building blocks allow them to stay on track through inevitable changes, such as workforce restructuring or application and process changes.

JIFFY.ai is proud to be a leader in the Zinnov Zones Breakout Zone. But we’re just getting started. Society is heading into the Great Reset, and process automation and reliance on digital channels will be a crucial ingredient to our recovery. JIFFY.ai HyperApps technologies will enable predictable wins in the short term, low effort overheads and greater democratization in the mid-term, and radical advantages in the long term. It’s time to disrupt business automation with HyperApps.

Have you ever said, “Let’s start small and then build it up based on how it goes,”? You sure have. So have most of us. In our world, this is typically how all automation begins.

During the initial days of robotic process automation (RPA), organizations were mostly skeptical. They saw potential but were unsure of real impact.

So, they tried it out for small non-critical functions — they wanted to minimize risks. Understandably. Say, the finance department would automate one task in the Accounts Payable first such as reading data from a file and transferring that to the ERP system. However, other aspects of the Accounts Payable process would continue to remain manual. Also, understandable.

This is what is called partial automation — quite literally, automating just a part of something much bigger.

But why would anyone do that?

In fact, there are plenty of reasons for handling automation this way.

For one, the earliest automation systems could only automate basic screen capture – in other words, anything that couldn’t be seen on a screen would break the process and need manual intervention.

Some of them are financial — end-to-end automation is more expensive and incurs higher opportunity costs to run business-as-usual in the interim because every sub-task would need investment in a bot. Partial automation, on the other hand, was cheaper. Organizations could pick a few bots for shorter processes and pay-as-they-go. This also helped them understand the effectiveness of automating and calculate ROI in the longer term.

Some industries worried about security. A bank would use RPA tools to move data from a front-end system to a legacy back-end system but wouldn’t let bots analyze their customer data. Even to this day, security remains an important reason companies choose partial automation. Why risk exposing critical data while their mandate – bolstered by regulatory requirements – is to protect it and keep it confidential?

Some others just weren’t ready for end-to-end RPA — automating a process end-to-end would necessitate standardization of formats, fields and rights, and that requires an investment of finances, as well as time and energy from their internal teams.

It also didn’t help that monitoring each automated process or bot was not easy. So, there was greater risk of broken automation if the scope was end-to end.

The initial RPA landscape had its limitations, lacking seamless integration with the human input when the time came for decision-making and without a human-in-the loop concept.

Most also feared that they might not have the people trained and equipped to intervene and improve the end-to-end RPA, making it a bigger risk. Partial automation is less demanding.

To be clear, in all these cases organizations certainly understood the value of RPA, invested in partial automation and derived value from it. Most of them are “somewhat happy” with the results their RPA systems are delivering.

Partial automation only provides partial success. Why?

Process measurement issues: Partial automation meant that a major part of the processes still had to be done manually, so there was no way to measure the ROI per process or per team/department. In other words, there was no way to make a strong case for automation because the results couldn’t be measured objectively.

Efficiency deficit: The improvement in overall process efficiency, while automating only a part of it, can often be so minimal it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Savings deficit: As efficiency is only marginally improved, cost savings also end up being marginal.

Stagnation: Partial automation can be a dead investment without the bot’s ability to learn, adapt or grow with the needs of the organization. Likewise, it can be a dead investment if the organization doesn’t have the ability to see and manage how automation is being applied across the enterprise.

Resource blocking: Without the ability to improve intelligently, partial automation still needs people to fill its gaps. This means that people continue to work on mundane tasks, leading to low productivity, fatigue and dissatisfaction.

Right, so is Intelligent Automation a possible end-to-end solution?

Intelligent or Cognitive Automation in its simplest form, is an intelligent version of RPA — one that can learn from the data and apply it to present needs. Automation can become limiting when not supported by the learning capabilities of AI, which is where intelligent automation comes into the picture. It is flexible enough to understand and adapt to non-templatized data inputs. It can process structured, semi-structured and unstructured information with ease.

Take JIFFY.ai’s cognitive automation tool, for instance. It is able to read and extract non-templatized information. Even in cases where JIFFY.ai doesn’t understand or cannot read certain parts of the document, it will extract all the other parts and reduce manual intervention to a bare minimum. This way, with cognitive RPA, you can automate the entire process, not just a part of it.

With its ability to learn, cognitive RPA is also scalable. As a business becomes more complex and processes more intricate, cognitive RPA can learn and grow along, making the ROI significant in the long term. For instance, intelligent automation systems that trigger alerts to floor supervisors in a manufacturing unit can learn to spot newer anomalies over time, making all aspects of productivity, quality and capacity predictable. Enterprises are addressing their requirement for end-to end automation using a combination of RPA tools (for repetitive tasks), BPM tools (for process management), OCR , IDP tools (for document extraction), Data platforms for data streaming and beyond.

Instead, a platform that makes all of these features available in a single stack can help save costs and time, and also translate to easily calculable returns over a period of time. This way, they can adopt cognitive RPA for all processes, interconnect them and enable them to work in tandem.

Cognitive RPA also comes with basic skills. Pre-built RPA systems, customized for industries and functions, are now available with the ability to hit the ground running immediately. Once installed, they are in auto-pilot mode needing very little help from people, even for setup, training or maintenance.

With prior knowledge, pre-built cognitive RPA solutions can automate end-to-end with a more meaningful understanding of the process landscape.

With cognitive RPA, the solution is no longer piecemeal. Unlike partial automation, cognitive automation impacts the entire value chain.

Today’s context

The global situation businesses face today is a reason for organizations to take seriously how end-to-end automation can help them to be more resilient in the face of crisis.

As an example, a large automaker based out of Europe has worked with JIFFY.ai in automating their financial processes. This truly helped them recently when there was no business shutdown in their country, and they continued to send in their documentation to JIFFY.ai’s offices where physical offices were shut down. Thanks to automation, backend support continued seamlessly while production continued as planned.

It is completely understandable if you have a partially automated system now. It made sense in its day. But today, to see the real value of automation, end-to-end cognitive automation is the way to go. With a clear view of the entire system, end-to-end RPA will be able to bring together various processes into a smoother journey, be it for your customers, vendors or employees. It will also future-proof you as the system understands your existing processes and can expand to accommodate newer ones.

If you have adopted partial automation and aren’t fully realizing its potential, speak to one of our consultants to explore newer avenues. We understand where you are and we’re happy to help.