The business landscape is changing at a dizzying pace. As a result, businesses are looking to accelerate their innovation efforts and deploy new technologies that can help create competitive advantages. As I noted elsewhere, “These efforts will be largely focused on the agility gained by reinventing their organizations around the principles of autonomy and intelligence. By leveraging technological breakthroughs in the areas of human-like reasoning and trusted generative AI, glass-box machine learning, and real-world optimization, businesses can make significant advancements towards this vision.”[1] What is the vision? The vision is creating an autonomous digital enterprise (ADE) and the vision is not new. Nearly half-a-decade ago, the staff at BMC predicted, that by 2025, “Technology will underpin every successful company and drive every business function, spanning customer relationships, business operations, and people management. In addition to an innovation mindset, these successful companies will have three common traits.”[2] Those traits are:
• Agility. “They create new operating models that integrate business, operations, and technology into standalone businesses-within-the-business domains. This approach allows organizations to run and reinvent themselves — they can be truly disruptive in one area while still supporting traditional businesses.”
• Customer Centricity. “They leverage a connected economy to ensure they can meet and exceed customer expectations. By creating an ecosystem that uses technology to cater to every touchpoint of the customer journey, these organizations seem to anticipate their customers’ requirements and deliver the goods and services needed at the right time — via the customer’s preferred channel.”
• Actionable Insights. “They know how to turn data into insights that drive actions which serve and anticipate customer needs. Organizations that know how to pull all the relevant information, capabilities, and people into the same place can act quickly and efficiently in making the right decisions.”
They add, “Mastering these traits in a shifting landscape requires the evolution of companies to a state that supports the business today, while keeping the future in mind. This is the path to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.”
What is an Autonomous Digital Enterprise?
The team at 10xDS agrees with the BMC staff that autonomous digital enterprises “are characterized by some common traits such as they all have incorporated ways to gain agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights.”[3] They continue, “Organizations that have already mastered these key traits are on the path to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise. This means they have evolved to a state where they can sustain their business today while securing their future. An autonomous enterprise learns and adapts to changing situations and business landscapes by automating processes and integrating operations and processes previously performed and managed by humans. Intelligent Automation leverages automation and AI technologies to mimic human actions and thinking. As the organization grows in automation maturity, it embarks on the journey to complete automation, reducing the dependency on human interventions across every facet of the organization.” It is important to note they stress “reducing dependency on human interventions” rather than eliminating humans from the workplace. The aim is to increase productivity not entirely eliminate human workers.
The 10xDS team goes on to delineate some of the principles used by autonomous digital enterprises. They write, “According to a research article by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, autonomous enterprises follow and are driven by three key principles: Context, Insights, and Actions. Here the ‘Context’ means the structural and behavioral model enterprises have in place, ‘Insights’ refers to the insights gleaned by leveraging Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) to operational data, and ‘Actions’ means the application of advanced automation technologies like Intelligent Automation or Hyperautomation to proactive, preventive, and reactive scenarios.” I have consistently made the point that insights aren’t very useful if actions aren’t taken once those insights are provided. Turning insights into actions requires decision-making.
Bain analysts, Michael C. Mankins and Lori Sherer, insist, “The best way to understand any company’s operations is to view them as a series of decisions.”[4] They add, “We know from extensive research that decisions matter — a lot. Companies that make better decisions, make them faster and execute them more effectively than rivals nearly always turn in better financial performance. Not surprisingly, companies that employ advanced analytics to improve decision making and execution have the results to show for it.” However, entrepreneur Graham Allcott once stated, “Great decision-making comes from the ability to create the time and space to think rationally and intelligently about the issue at hand.” The only way to square up Allcott’s view of great decision-making with the views of Mankins and Sherer is to let machines make routine decisions so that humans are freed to concentrate on more important decision-making. That strategy lies at the heart of the autonomous digital enterprise and it’s why Enterra Solutions® is focused on advancing the Enterra Autonomous Decision Science™ (ADS®) platform. ADS is the next step in the journey beyond data science. Using ADS, the machine plays the role of the data scientist or subject matter expert to help optimize your business and help it run at the speed of the marketplace. As a result, you can make decisions that take advantage of market opportunities as quickly as possible.
Concluding Thoughts
A 2023 study commissioned by Pega and conducted by research firm Savanta found, “The majority of global decision-makers say they plan to fully embrace the autonomous enterprise within the next 10 years.”[5] Tech journalist Adrian Bridgwater reports, “The study found that 58% of respondents expect to define themselves as an autonomous enterprise within the next 10 years. With just 15% saying they feel they are already at this stage today and 36% projecting they will reach this point five years from now, the upward curve of autonomous enterprise adoption is clear. Some three-quarters (73%) of respondents said they already have some sort of plan to start becoming an autonomous enterprise. When asked what they expected their position to be 10 years from now, an overwhelming 96% said the same.”[6]
Although the journey leading to the autonomous digital enterprise may be taken in incremental steps, companies need to begin that journey by taking a holistic approach rather than a piecemeal one. Enterra® uses its powerful ADS capability to enable “End-to-End Value Chain Optimization and Decision-Making” at scale and allows clients to uncover and understand the interrelationships that lead to innovative new product development and innovation, heightened consumer understanding and targeted marketing, revenue growth tactics, and intelligent demand and supply-chain planning. As I concluded elsewhere, “Marketplace agility is being unlocked today through a federated intelligent layer of technology that can span organizational silos to drive competitiveness, resiliency, and corporate value. Just as people were once skeptical of autopilot in planes, autonomous enterprise optimization and decision-making applications will soon be widely adopted and will transform the way businesses operate and compete. Companies that lean into the integration of autonomous business optimization and decision-making with new ways of working, enabled by these technological advances, will be in the best position to succeed in the future.”[7]
Footnotes
[1] Daniel Gutierrez, “Heard on the Street – 1/25/2024,” Inside AI News, 25 January 2024.
[2] Staff, “The Autonomous Digital Enterprise,” BMC, January 2020.
[3] Staff, “What is an Autonomous Digital Enterprise? Its principles, levels, and characteristics,” 10xDS, 25 February 2022.
[4] Michael C. Mankins and Lori Sherer, “Creating value through advanced analytics,” Bain Brief, 11 February 2015.
[5] Adrian Bridgwater, “PegaWorld iNspire 2023: The birth of the autonomous enterprise,” ERP Today, 12 June 2023.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Gutierrez, op cit.
