The 2025 process automation guide: Setting the right priorities

Why is process automation relevant now?

The question is no longer: "Is process efficiency technology worth the investment?"

It's: "Can an organization keep up without it?" 

“Due to economic conditions, process optimization as a means to reduce cost or improve efficiencies has become a key focus for a large number of enterprises,” Gartner wrote in its Market Guide for Business Process Automation Tools.

The same report goes on to say: “Forty-two percent of the respondents to the 2022 Gartner Next-Generation Cost Savings in General and Administrative Function Survey indicated that cost optimization via improved resources automation is a top-three technique used successfully by IT leaders for 2023.”

Benefits of process automation

Process automation benefits organizations by driving speed and accuracy. It can also create a better work environment and customer service atmosphere. 

 More benefits include: 

• Optimized processes: When set up correctly, process automation provides an efficient and well-organized workflow. In manual processes, employees often create quick fixes to keep the workflow moving. These Band-Aids typically end up creating process challenges as they scale.
• Reduction of manual effort: If your workflow requires someone to read documents and enter data, process automation will save you time. It is possible AI can even make decisions about the next steps. 
• Boosted productivity and innovation: The automation of rote tasks enables your team to focus on more business-critical tasks. This could include innovating or providing high-touch value to customers.
• Improved accuracy: Manual processes often introduce errors, and even small errors in data can prove costly. Automated processes follow rules and flag anything that doesn’t fit parameters.  When you pair your process automation solution with AI, the AI will learn to problem-solve these issues itself.
• Reduced costs: A fast, accurate and fine-tuned process eliminates inefficiencies. This leads to cost savings that you can reinvest in priority areas.
• Stricter compliance: Standardized, consistently performed processes mean better compliance. A solution that provides automated audit trails saves time and helps prove compliance. 
• Improved scalability:  For enterprises with seasonal peaks or those experiencing rapid periods of growth, automated processes can easily compensate for the increased workload.
• Great entry point for bringing AI into your workplace: From intelligent capture to the machine learning that helps optimize your processes and outcomes, AI allows you to continually improve while keeping all the benefits of automation.

Process automation examples

Process automation can be used in essentially any industry and across many departments, and the application of the technology is expansive. Here are just a few process automation use cases to give you an idea of how organizations make use of it:

Healthcare

Large healthcare organizations receive millions of patient documents and medical records a year. These files need to be quickly classified to enable optimal care decisions.

For one major provider, automating the medical records classification process with intelligent capture, extraction and validation technology changed lives, for both patients and providers. Data was accurately brought into the system early, then moved by bots to the correct places and put in front of the right people. Consequently, records became accessible faster than ever possible when processed manually. 

Read the case study: How an academic health system decreased turnaround times

Financial services

Bots, like those used in robotic process automation (RPA), can easily identify data on mortgage lending documentation, replicate it to the appropriate places and advance it in the loan origination system, underwriting and any other systems that require it.

Read more: Hyland expert on the power of intelligent automation in banking

Government

A county auditor office had six staffers manually complete 90,000 personal property tax returns. They did this for nearly half the year, every year.

They then brought in a system-agnostic RPA system. This automated the repetitive, tedious task of entering tax return data into their system. Using conditional business rules, RPA even helped flag erroneous or fraudulent data that was then sent to a human auditor for review. In year one of this system, the county processed one-third of its returns with zero human touchpoints. 

Read the case study: Horry County’s process automation success story 

Education

The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), a fast-growing public university and Research I institution, implemented process automation across 25 departments. The initiative tallied a lot of wins, but perhaps the most meaningful was its admissions success. By automating the application process, UTD eased administrative burdens and delivered not just top-tier service to college applicants, but also positively impacted decision-making.

Now UTD makes offers to best-fit students faster than nearly any other institution — a strategy that research shows factors into students’ acceptance decisions. 

Read the case study: How UTD makes admission decisions less than 48 hours after receiving applications

Accounts payable department

A real-estate investment firm used a paper-based process across 50 office locations. The invoice turnaround times took up to 30 days. This content chaos was negatively impacting employees, customers and the bottom line.

In response, the firm adopted an AP process automation solution, augmented with AI and an integration to its line-of-business system JD Edwards. The firm trimmed weeks off its payment cycle. This meant employees could capture an invoice in one location in the morning and cut a check that afternoon. On top of this, data quality improved and the idea of a lost invoice was eliminated. 

Read the case study: Intelligent process automation leads to $1 million in savings a year

Human resources department

A retail company's HR team found it hard to manage operations with paper-based processes and multiple offices. This changed when it onboarded a process automation component with its content services platform.  The new technology digitized content, automated document retention and broke down workflow silos. Documents that used to get stuck on desks for days were now visible to the whole team and better able to keep moving. 

Read the case study: HR team automates document retention

What are the types of process automation?

As automation solutions evolve, it’s important for organizations to remember they are standing on the shoulders of giants.

Each step in the automation process builds on the last, forming a chain of advanced technologies. 

Business process automation (BPA)

Business process automation (BPA) helps unify and automate repeatable business activities and services. It improves the accuracy, efficiency, visibility and compliance of core business tasks on a day-to-day basis. 

Intelligent process automation (IPA)

Intelligent process automation (IPA) revolutionizes organizational processes and eliminates users' daily robotic tasks. Instead, AI-infused bots complete that rote work. IPA speeds up work, decreases manual errors and simplifies interactions.

Intelligent document processing

Intelligent document processing (IDP) is an AI-powered digital solution that goes beyond the fixed capabilities of RPA and optical character recognition (OCR). IDP uses AI to read and understand the text and formatting within semistructured and unstructured content. This ability enables forms and documents to be processed automatically.

Machine learning (ML) technology “teaches" the IDP software how to make sense of documents, so the more it works, the smarter and more effective it becomes.

Workflow automation

Workflow automation is the process of automating manual tasks, documentation and data flows using rules and logic. A workflow itself is a sequence of tasks that must be completed in a specific order to achieve an objective.

Learn more: A guide to digital asset management workflows

Robotic process automation

RPA uses a software with bots to drive business efficiency and accuracy by automating and standardizing repeatable business tasks. It mimics predictable human behavior within a system, such as completing the clicks a worker would make in a standardized workflow). 

Learn more: 50+ RPA use cases

Application integration

Direct integration between two or more applications can also be a great way to automate data-centric tasks without requiring any human touch.

The future of process automation is tied to AI

Early generations of process automation solutions lack the capabilities of today’s AI-powered options. Simply put: Artificial intelligence changes everything.

With the maturation of AI, organizations can expand their horizons on what is automatable. 

Process automation opportunities used to be limited to repeatable, programmable pathways. With AI, it can now be applied to unstructured, dynamic processes. Where it once required human review and intervention, today, accurate processing can be taught to machines. These machines can then learn to be even more human-like as they work, while still delivering higher accuracy at a greater speed. 

The fusion of AI with process automation drastically increases the value and impact organizations gain from their efforts to expand automation.

Processes that depend on a historical knowledgebase — that alarming situation that happens when institutional knowledge is locked up with one person, for example — can be dramatically improved with AI. An AI automation solution can not only access and comprehend vast, intricate data from previous situations, but it can also draw insight and conclusions from that data.

“Investing in artificial intelligence for growth, efficiency and competitiveness isn't a leap of faith anymore, but a strategic necessity for businesses,” said Tiago Cardoso, principal product manager at Hyland. “Rapidly evolving AI technologies can pose significant risk to organizations that fail to adopt them. Being late to the AI game may mean not just missing out on opportunities, but could also risk businesses becoming obsolete, unable to keep pace with AI-enabled competitors.”