It’s that time of year again. Technology companies and analysts are busy looking into their crystal balls and publishing their intelligent automation 2023 predictions for the market. With the global economy facing continuing headwinds, organizations need to plan strategically and are focused on building operational resiliency.

For leaders looking to validate their thinking about their intelligent automation journey and how to scale programs, we’ve pulled the top predictions into one easy round-up to help you benchmark programs and drive strategic planning for the year ahead.

Gartner – Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023

Business leaders and technologists can leverage Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023 to assess the potential impact of emerging technologies on specific strategies. These trends include growing revenue, accelerating digital, maximizing value from data, or protecting and building your brand. These trends could represent a risk or opportunity for organizations. The list will help leaders create a technology roadmap to drive impact on a range of strategic ambitions. Three trends touch on IA and focus on optimizing systems for more excellent reliability, improved data-driven decision-making, and maintaining the value and integrity of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in production.

— Digital Immune System creates an enhanced customer experience by combining multiple software engineering strategies to protect against risk. It delivers resilient systems that mitigate operational and security risks through observability, automation, and revolutionary design and testing.

— Applied Observability works from the data emitted by an organization, using AI to analyze and make recommendations, which allows an enterprise to make faster and more accurate future decisions. When applied systematically, it can reduce the latency for response and optimize business operations in real-time.

— AI TRiSM supports AI model governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, robustness, efficacy, and data protection. It combines methods for explaining AI results, rapidly deploying new models, actively managing AI security, and controls for privacy and ethics issues.

The strategic technology trends will help fulfill an organization’s needs to optimize, scale or pioneer. The trends allow leaders to align technology innovation with the future strategic objectives of the enterprise.

Forrester – Predictions 2023: Automation and Robotics

Despite the significant benefits of automation that have been proven over the past several years, Forrester’s Predictions 2023 expects a slight dampening of automation velocity. Economic uncertainty drives a more rational approach that taps the breaks on transformation to focus on core business drivers such as resilience and efficiency. Efforts will pay off for those with the grit to adjust to 2023 realities but also double down on automation to reap a competitive advantage. Among the key predictions for the coming year:

— Data-driven automation will be hot. Most automation tackles static processes, but data insights are changing that. One-third of enterprises will prioritize data-driven automation, with data events from IoT or state changes in ML applications driving next-gen business process transformation. This recognition is sending ripples through process automation markets.

— Skill shortages will slow automation progress. 2023 will see slower progress in rolling out new automation support. The big issue is a lack of needed skills. These include a slower ramp for business developers to succeed with low-code development tools, skill gaps for professional developers across the AI spectrum, and a shortage of trained analysts and project managers for automation projects. Skills shortages are perpetual, but 2023 will be unusually difficult.

— 25% of automation CoEs will reorganize to support federated development. Centers of excellence (CoEs) gained prominence in 2019, particularly with the surge in intelligent and robotic process automation. A central view helped scale automations, share and develop skills, and govern deployments. But things change, and in 2023, several CoEs will migrate execution tasks such as training and implementation to the primary business lines they support. The more strategic functions of security review, automation architecture, and guardrail governance will remain in automation COEs. Low-code software improvements and the desire to federate to achieve scale will drive this shift.

UiPath – Automation Trends 2023

At this point, automation should no longer be a question of whether it’s appropriate for your organization. Automation has been shown to deliver “Day 1 Impact” and “Year 1 Payback.” Today’s real question is how to move automation forward and fully utilize the technology. As an industry leader, UiPath’s Automation Trends 2023 offers a unique perspective on the market, technology, and users. They have distilled insights from their team, customers, and partners into seven key trends shaping automation today and tomorrow.

Trend 1: Automation becomes the enterprise’s new way of operating and innovating.

Trend 2: Businesses ramp up automation to counteract growing labor and inflation pressure.

Trend 3: Digital CIOs step up their role—and step up automation to meet new goals.

Trend 4: Process mining and automated testing become “must-haves” in driving best-in-class, enterprise-wide automation.

Trend 5: Low-code becomes a top priority for getting automation and AI in more people’s hands.

Trend 6: New AI-powered innovations push automation’s boundaries even further.

Trend 7: Rounding out digital skills becomes the next hot issue for HR and IT leadership.

In making enterprise-wide automation a strategic priority, the executive leadership sets the stage to get the most out of the technology. Holistic automation matters. Complete, enterprise-wide automation introduces 40% greater productivity and efficiency improvements over piecemeal automation alone.

Automation Anywhere – Now & Next Report

The global state of automation is good, and the future looks bright. The third edition of Automation Anywhere’s Now & Next Report provides insights unavailable from any other data set. It is tightly focused on intelligent automation and how businesses embrace—and succeed—in the Automation Economy.

Given the current economic environment, companies are shifting from productivity improvement and employee experience to reduced operating costs and enhanced business continuity as critical drivers for automation deployment. Among the nuggets in the report to help assess the state of your automation program:

— 78% say they plan to increase automation budgets for the next 12 months, with 24%expecting to increase budgets by 25% or more

— Nearly three-quarters of respondents say they can automate at least 30% of work

— 37%report training citizen developers is a top-five priority for next year

— Two-thirds of respondents project they will hit 100-plus bot deployments within the next 12 months, with 42% expecting to deploy a minimum of 300 RPA bots within the next 12 months

— The top areas targeted for automation over the coming year include IT/data management (74%), customer service and support (38%), finance (27%), human resources (26%), and marketing and sales (25%)

Start Now, Think Big, Go Fast

As companies strive to create scalable, sustainable, intelligent automation solutions, they rely on a diverse technology mix to shift from delivering tactical to strategic workflow automation. Market insights can help companies benchmark their programs to peer organizations and complement strategic planning.

If you want to learn more about how IA enables you to win in the market and delivers operational excellence to the enterprise, let’s talk.