Business is challenged to find talent to fill critical roles. In the U.S. there are currently more open roles than workers, the labor market is weighted toward workers and they’re demanding more. They don’t want to do the same work they did before — they want more from their work.

It’s a huge challenge for today’s enterprises. They need to offer meaningful work that brings in workers, without asking them to perform the low-level administrative work that they increasingly won’t tolerate. A shrinking talent pool and new expectations are forcing companies to rethink how they attract and retain talent.

Digital labor: solving multiple challenges

The first order of business is to keep the talent you have. The good news is that there’s a new option that can help enterprises transform the way that labor is matched to the work to be done. Using digital labor at scale (> 10% of total labor) can offload lower-level work and create capacity in your existing talent pool, while also making your roles more attractive as you go to market for new talent.

In recent years, the core capability of digital workers has multiplied exponentially. This is largely thanks to the law of accelerating returns. Combining multiple capabilities has enhanced digital labor to where it can take work that includes unstructured data.

The original robotic process automation (RPA) bots of 10+ years ago — or digital workers as we prefer to call them — could carry out only the most basic repetitive automation tasks. Although this was useful, their use was limited to tactical line-of-business solutions in most organizations. Different point solutions were developed for HR, accounts payable, legal, etc. However, in recent years, the capabilities of digital workers have grown and become augmented thanks to wider advances in many areas including big data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

Digital workers today have things like machine vision; optical- and intelligent-character recognition respectively (OCR/ICR) and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), which allow digital workers to read and route documents. With natural language processing (NLP), digital workers can now understand and process documents. This is not some fundamental discovery that is making headlines. Each of these technologies has been evolving rapidly. This is a direct result of recombinant innovation. These are not additive capabilities — 1+1+1 no longer equals three, it is 7 or even 15. The power of digital workers has multiplied.

Automation is the catalyst for change in the Enterprise

As GE’s Jack Welch noted, enterprises must change before they need to. But change has always been difficult, especially for large organizations. Cultural acceptance is difficult and, to be meaningful, it must come from the top. It’s also clear that organizations that can embrace or even lead change are usually in the winners' circle. This was seen with quality, offshoring and enterprise resource planning (ERP.)

So, what’s the answer? What can catalyze change within an organization?

The solution is digital onshoring or as I like to call it “no-shoring.” Creating a unified workforce that combines your digital workers with your human employees. Increased efficiency combined with high-quality work is the desired outcome, and automation is the catalyst that enables this to happen.

While automation received some bad press, and there was predictable dystopian rhetoric in its early days, this is not the first time we’ve seen this pattern. Automation is delivering for business, and even the belief that your associates aren’t interested in automation is being dispelled. According to Bain, 86% of employees now express a desire to use automation to remove digital drudgery. This is very different from the previous narrative fearing that “robots will take my job.” According to data from Smartsheet 75% of workers are expecting automation to do part of their jobs. People want automation.

The potential for this new kind of labor is transformational. The enterprise of the future will consider digital labor an integral part of the workforce, partnering with humans to multiply the potential for organizations as they navigate change.

*This post is the second part of a blog post originally published at Blueprism website as "Automation is the Catalyst for Change"