Imagine how much more productive and efficient your work would be if you could take all of the repetitive, routine, and manual work out of your day. Imagine if that kind of work were simply done for you, freeing up more time for value-added work that can drive success for you, your business, and your customers.
A growing number of companies are going beyond simply imagining it.
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Many knowledge workers spend a lot of time manually entering and retrieving information between multiple systems as part of a multi-step, manual process. This is not the best use of a person’s time, and could erode morale and employee engagement.
In the APAC Engagement Research conducted by Salesforce, 34% office workers strongly agree that outdated and inefficient technology makes them feel unhappy and unmotivated at work. And this lack of motivation adversely affects the quality of their work. They say their workplace experience could be improved with technology to help them with a variety of business tasks — particularly messaging or collaboration (49%), customer or client communications (45%), and client record management (39%).
When office workers were asked to nominate the issues that negatively affect their engagement at work, the top two were technology-related: when it fails or doesn’t work as it should (60%) and the quality of the technology (51%).
How can companies identify opportunities for automation? Global Field Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of digital transformation office at MuleSoft, Matt McLarty said one large financial services firm did it by asking employees a simple question: What’s the dumbest thing you have to do every day?
"They made it into a contest, with prizes," he said. "People were so frustrated about wasting their time on this stuff that they volunteered all this information, which created a foundation for the company to automate those things."
Efficiency, productivity, and cost containment are top priorities for business leaders. You can automate and integrate work across every business function and system, so you can focus on the things that grow your business.
Like other digital transformations, the success of end-to-end automation relies on cultural changes driven from the top and executed in each function. Training, incentives, and key performance indicators are all essential.
Spending on automation, particularly AI systems in Asia Pacific will rise from $17.6 billion in 2022 to around $32 billion in 2025. The impact is profound, affecting the way we work, compete, innovate, and serve customers.
Prepare your business for a digital future. Learn how to automate your business to be more efficient and productive.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the Salesforce blog.