Amritsar, NFAPost: Covid-19 pandemic has brought about major changes in the way any organisation works, and as companies shift from physical locations to remote working pattern, more than 70% of the firms feel that at least half of their workforce will be digital workers post Covid-19, according to a latest survey.
The survey titled “Work World is Transforming” conducted by Automation Anywhere, a global developer of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software, showed one in four organisations expect that over 80% of their workforce will become digital workforce in a world post Covid-19.
The study surveyed more than 5,000 senior executives from midsize-to-large organisations across 20 countries including India, the Middle East and emerging markets in Africa and Southeast Asia.
“The pandemic has encouraged a new wave of digitisation that will revolutionise our life as we know it. The organisations are transforming their engagements with customers, employees, suppliers and other stakeholders and will leverage the current crisis as an opportunity to drive innovative digital models to gain increased efficiencies,” said Milan Sheth, Executive Vice President of IMEA at Automation Anywhere.
Automation technologies are not new, and have been adapted at various levels earlier such as chatbots, automated tele-calling, voice assistants, or the industrialised robotic environment. However, now the Covid-19 situation has triggered a sense of urgency to deploy these technologies.
In a report titled “COVID-19 – Tipping for automation”, Indian information technology industry body Nasscom had also said that the pandemic has catered as a catalyst for the development of automation technologies.
“The global and India industry will require unprecedented and concerted attempts to recover and revive from the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, and in this process, it will find itself at a crucial tipping point of mass-transition towards wide-scale automation adoption,” Nasscom President Debjani Ghosh had said.
The survey by Automation Anywhere found that more than 80% of the surveyed organisations plan to invest in digital technologies to build resilience in their future business plans.
The study also showed that 57% of respondents aim to acquire skills in RPA and AI in the post COVID-19 world, followed by 28% being reskilled in analytics, and 15% in machine learning.
Financial services sector was one of the early adopters of automation technologies. The manufacturing and e-commerce sectors have now stepped up their efforts to implement automation technologies.
The trends emerged through the survey were seen across key industries, such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), global capability centers (GCCs) and pharma, healthcare and life sciences.
“While certain sectors like manufacturing, travel and retail have been hardest hit by the pandemic, they remain optimistic and are seeking new, digital technologies to understand customer behavior and drive new models for engaging them as the crisis ends,” the survey said.
