Our bot workforce by David O'Brien - Mind the Product

In this ProductTank Cork talk, David O’Brien, Director of Automation Experience and Centre of Excellence at Dell Technologies, gives insight into the bot workforce, also known as robot process automation. 

Watch the video to see his talk in full or read on for an overview of his key points:

• Automation Experience
• Changing Footprint
• Why Product
• Looking Forward

Automation Experience 

The bot workforce is built around the concept that we can expect that everything that can and should be automated will be automated, rightly or wrongly. Initially, this caused a lot of fear; however, a change has shown how many things can be accomplished and how personnel can do their jobs faster.  

Some examples of what can be achieved with a bot workforce include: 

• Process Automation to replace and assist staff in rules-based processes or repeatable, high-volume manual processes. This includes data entry and scraping, ERP data cleaning, and talent acquisition. 
• Intelligent Process Automation to assist staff with automated data insights, reports and responses as well as complex, multivariable processes that can be improved with targeted insights. This includes natural language processing, investment advice, and automated support through chatbots. 
• Cognitive Computing to replace staff with probabilistic decision-making as well as complex processes with rich, historical databases. This includes customer service bots, predictive data diagnostics, and deep learning. 

Changing Footprint

David highlights some of the benefits of adopting the bot workforce at Dell, including automation benefits for productivity and global teams, increased sales productivity, demand generation, customer care, and financial team benefits in accounting, treasury, and global tax departments. 

By implementing RPA bots, they have reduced costs from maintenance renewals. The bot workforce can aid in shifting away from a traditional water approach towards being more agile and product-led across the entire organization. 

Why Product

For product managers, it’s essential to be aware that we are currently at the tip of the spear for digital transformation. The bot workforce can provide rapid prototyping, which will lead to faster innovation. It can free companies from the IT budget lifecycle and offer opportunities for strategic funding and tactical allocation of funds. 

It allows for a user-centric focus on stakeholders as well as continuous delivery and agility to optimize performance and product stability. Ultimately this enables product managers to move faster on their roadmaps and create digital workers to enable automation. 

Looking forward

David mentions some potential technologies to look forward to, including increased digital workers, low-code tools, hybrid automation workplaces, and process engineering 2.0. The key takeaways from this talk are that automation technologies continue to improve and can help increase the speed of product delivery, reduce budgets and help make product managers’ lives easier. 

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