Automation is one of the best ways to improve production efficiency, wherever it is applied. Ironically enough, IT – the area where it should supposedly thrive – has for a long time been fairly weak in this respect. However, this situation is changing – and in future, we are very likely to see bots automating different aspects of various business processes used more and more widely.

So, where and how businesses can benefit from this development? Let’s take a look.

1.  It can fully or partially replace certain human workers

Well, perhaps robots aren’t taking our jobs just yet, but they certainly make first tentative steps towards it. Speaking of robots we, of course, mean software bots – computer programs created to perform automated tasks. Even at their current fairly limited level, they are already fully capable of automating about 30 percent of the tasks done by customer support contact centers – which can result in $23 billion savings in the United States alone. This is just one industry – potential applications are as broad as one’s imagination.

2.  It speeds up testing and makes it more reliable

Automation is of special interest for testing procedures. As we all know, IT development calls for extensive testing and checking which, in turn, requires a lot of repetitive and mechanical work – that is, if it is done manually. A piece of code has to be run through a lot of tests before it is considered to be written without mistakes and inconsistencies, and using automation can greatly speed up this process as well as make it less error-prone – unlike people, properly programmed bots don’t make mistakes. Many firms (like automation testing company A1QA) working in this area have already demonstrated considerable success in automating sanity tests, smoke tests and many other ways of checking code’s consistency.

3.  It greatly decreases the amount of manual work

Not just in testing but in many other operations. For example, a bot may evaluate customer’s input to see if it follows the guidelines you’ve provided (e.g., refuse to accept photos that are larger than 2 Mb and make sure they have faces on them and not some random images).

4.  It saves time

Even if you still have to perform a great deal of work manually, automation can help you organize it in a way that will save your time and secure you from many possible mistakes. For example, if you work in marketing it will still be necessary to write your Twitter or Facebook posts, but you don’t have to worry about posting them at regular intervals, nor do you run a risk of ever forgetting or not having an opportunity to post. You simply write a number of posts in advance and allow a script to post them at times you need them.

5.  It streamlines communication

Automation means that information is collected, kept and processed in a centralized manner – as a result, it can always be accessed from any part of the network, and delays and problems arising from the inability of an agent to acquire the necessary data immediately are simply impossible. Your customers will always get quality customer support, members of one department won’t waste time trying to get the vital data from their colleagues working in another department, and so on.

All in all, automation has a broad set of implications both for IT and business in general, and we are just at the beginning of the way. In future, we are likely to see many processes we are used to getting changed forever due to the rise in self-correcting bots and even more sophisticated programs.