London-based Raj Mistry has more than 30 years of leadership in the software industry across sales, service, project delivery, and management consulting. In July, he joined Automation Anywhere as Executive Vice-President, Europe and the Middle East region, accelerate cloud automation offerings in these geographies.

Earlier, Mistry worked for Mulesoft, where he was an executive vice-president and general manager for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region. He also served as executive vice- president of solution engineering in EMEA at Salesforce for over 15 years. During his tenure at Salesforce, Mistry held executive leadership roles across numerous sales functions at local, regional, and global levels.

Intelligent Automation has been the answer for solving many business problems across industries by the implementation of digital workers, allowing humans to focus on customer-centric insight driven activity while software bots took over the mundane and repetitive tasks. Automation Anywhere, a pioneer in the space of cloud-native automation, has been helping companies augment their workforce since 2003. The company recently launched a suite of services leading with the Automation Success platform, a comprehensive set of innovative solutions that help enterprises engage with employees, connect disparate applications, whether cloud-native or on-premises enabling business growth and workforce productivity.

There has been an overwhelming rise of the global automation market and the growing opportunity across the Middle East region.

“Today, every company is operating in the automation economy, with 95 per cent of organisations embracing automation in this new world,” Mistry said.

Businesses have accelerated their automation adoption plans across the world and including in the Middle East region to manage business challenges better. The ''Automation Now & Next 2022' report found that more than 54 per cent of enterprises globally have been using Intelligent Automation for more than two years, and an additional 28 per cent have jumped on board within the last year. Many organisations are also planning to spend more on robotic process automation (RPA) over the next 12 months. Almost half of them will increase spending by as much as 24 per cent, with 11 per cent of them increasing their spending by over 25 per cent.

Mistry elaborated on a discernible trend. “The potential of automation generates significant economic value and opens up new possibilities in the region. Automation will be a progressive process, showcasing immense potential with various industries. The adoption of automation is expected to be higher in nations like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait by 2030 than the estimated global average of 32 per cent, indicating that the rate of change has been sluggish but is now increasing.

In particular, we are seeing the government and banking sectors are not only adopting automation but are scaling it across various departments as they increase efforts to transform their economies digitally. The UAE and the KSA have introduced a number of substantial digital initiatives as part of their individual Vision 2030 goals. Bahrain has unveiled plans to spend more than $30 (Dh110.19) billion on 22 landmark projects spanning important industries. Similar to this, Qatar's ongoing TASMU programme aims to fully implement solutions and collaboration across priority sectors,” he said.

Automation helps companies retain their back-office functions in the same country letting end users get a culture specific personalised experience, allowing better human connection with the customer leading to faster resolution of any possible downtime and providing better customer experience.

Fintech dominance in the UAE

In the fintech domain, the UAE is one of the world's top adopters of digital banking, placing sixth in the global scale of digital banking penetration. The country is expected to have 41 per cent penetration of digital banking by the end of 2027, an increase of 22 percentage points.

Besides, the automation economy is accelerating the digital transformation efforts of businesses across the Middle East region.

IDC research shows that 49 per cent of Middle East Chief Investment Officers (CIOs) have brought forward their digital agendas by at least one year – and 14 per cent by almost two years – following the upheaval of 2020. Many of these CIOs are actively reviewing and exploring new digital business models and ecosystem partnerships for the long term.

“Automation will serve as a crucial building block to develop a robust technology infrastructure allowing companies to scale. Intelligent Automation spans the entire automation journey—discovery, automation, optimization—automating any front- or back-office business process, and orchestrating work across combined human-bot teams,” he added.

Workforce transformation

Mistry shared insights as to how and why 94 per cent of firms are powering workforce transformation with cloud-native automation.

“More organisations see automation as a core component of ongoing business operations rather than a point solution to a tactical challenge.

This translates into real business benefits, too, with the average return on investment (ROI) of automation projects more than doubling to 6.3x over the previous year. It also proves the financial value of automation even in the face of macroeconomic headwinds and has pushed more than half, or 53 per cent, of respondents to shift their near-term focus away from automation ROI to performance goals and benefits,” Mistry said.

“Our current focus in the region is on the UAE and KSA where digital transformation agendas are robust and continue to scale. At GITEX, we launched the Automation Success Platform, designed to accelerate business transformation by making automation accessible for everyone,” he added.

The expanded platform offers organisations across the region with a powerful set of automation tools designed to empower employees in the apps they use every day to create a better, fulfilling work experience. New solutions include Document Automation, AARI for Every App, CoE Manager, Citizen Development, Process Discovery, and the Automation Pathfinder Program.

At present, the company has estimated 200 partners in the Middle East region, including some marquee names in government and financial services sectors.

“The goal is to make automation more solution-oriented, accessible to a billion more workers, successful at scale, and focused on solving problems. The Citizen Development app of the company will now be housed under the new Automation Success Platform, which was widely displayed atop the NASDAQ tower in New York City last week in an effort to give everyday employees power over automation.

Every employee will have access to a streamlined builder using the app to make their own digital co-worker. It will have built-in governance tools for standardization and business standards and a low-code user interface. Every citizen-developed bot will be automatically scanned by a static code analysis for potential flaws and additional machine learning opportunities as additional security,” he added.

The marquee clients in the UAE

The realty major has a use case to reconcile more than 400 bank accounts daily with the receipts received in their ERP system. Before automation, there were four dedicated full-time employees challenged with the daily reconciliation process. Each of the 400 accounts required logging in to the individual banking portal, and each bank statement downloaded before starting a manual reconciliation process.

 

For EMAAR Human Resource’s quarterly education expense reimbursement, a benefit provided to all EMAAR’s 10,000 employees for their children’s education, the company leverages the power of IQ Bot’s intelligent document processing. The process of manually checking 10,000 employee documents was very complex and time consuming and required automation. Now employees file for reimbursement by submitting their information into self-service ERP which triggers a bot to run the OCR and validate multiple business rules, and automatically rejects or approves the transaction. If the bot is not able to take a decision it automatically reassigns the transaction to a human for manual verification, which is around 15 per cent of the overall transaction volume.

: Arab National Bank has automated 35 manual repetitive business processes within the bank using artificial (AI)-powered RPA platform. More than 100 software bots now perform tasks within the bank's Operations, Compliance, HR, and other departments. Overall, ANB has completed more than 2 million requests saving 40,000 hours of manual work, with Automation Anywhere's Cloud-Native RPA Platform.

 

Network International: Automation has spread to over 70 processes, more than 150 sub-processes, and 120 bots in production. There has been a 70 per cent reduction in manual processing time and chargeback requests are automatically processed. At the same time of deploying automation, the business hired staff; 40 and 60 per cent, externally and internally, respectively.

 

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