Reflecting on 2022 and how to succeed in 2023

The CEO Interview

With the end of the year approaching fast, Sarah Burnett, our Chief technology Evangelist, sat down with Adam Bujak, our CEO to look back at 2022 and what is in store for us in 2023.

Sarah: 2022 has been another historical year with war in Europe, global business uncertainty and the continuing shortage of skills. How have successful businesses achieved resilience in this difficult year?

Adam: Yes, uncertainty has become the new normal and there’s much to learn from our clients who have ridden the various waves of it. Take our food and agri-business client whose industry has been significantly affected by the global uncertainty in supply chains and rising costs of fuel and material. Its head of operational excellence at its Global Business Services (GBS) talked of losing sleep thinking about the challenges that his business faced (check out the keynote at SSON Singapore). The GBS invested in KYP.ai productivity mining to support its transformation and operational excellence initiatives. As a result it has gained control over volatility with end-to-end visibility of operations. The results have been improved management in a hybrid home/office work environment, optimised processes and resources, enhanced customer and employee experience and more digital capabilities. Another client has increased the levels of automation by 34% and discovered unused capacity of > 30%.

Phil Fersht of HfS Research says: “Inflation-related pressures will likely culminate in a huge wave of job reductions, sparking demand for autonomous technologies to fill the void.” I couldn’t agree more and see tremendous pressure on businesses. Demand for our software in the last 6 months has skyrocketed (KYP.ai is now collecting data in 29 countries on four continents), which clearly indicates how critical it has became to boost visibility into how work is done in the organisation with granular data to gain agility and insights allowing you to deal with external pressures and macro-economic factors.

Sarah: What challenges are our customers facing as we go into 2023?

Adam: Our clients talk of their biggest challenges being the management of the hybrid office with most of the staff not willing to come back into the office. It is making it near to impossible to coordinate complex processes and reduce inefficiencies, and to drive impactful transformation with solid automation ROI. They want to achieve speed, scale, and quality. They want to achieve these outcomes while improving employee work/life balance. They also want an inspired workforce that is engaged and feels valued, to attract and keep top talent. Operational excellence and good customer experience supported by high-performing technology and optimised processes are other important priorities. You cannot achieve these objectives without high quality, end to end data and corresponding insights.

Sarah: Tell me about the skills that organisations need to take full advantage of productivity mining?

Adam: Our primary goal is to deliver an outstanding, extremely intuitive KYP.ai user experience, allowing both top and middle management to see, understand and act quickly (we call it Know Your Product). You do not need any training to achieve that level. Those in charge of team leadership, process transformation and automation go through dedicated training paths with effort counted in hours. We also provide visibility at the employee level boosting the bottom up improvement drive. In this way you have a holistic system, resulting in orchestrated effort, targeting both stable delivery and continuous transformation.

Sarah: This year we responded to the global skills shortage with Knowledge Automator, our joint offering with XpertRule that automates knowledge-intensive processes and we joined forces with a group of partners in the Intelligent Automation Collective. Tell me more about these and what opportunities you see coming from them in 2023?

Adam: Our ambition is no less than supporting our customers in the creation of the autonomous enterprise that you wrote about in your book.

Knowledge Automator takes the concept of intelligent business process automation further, firstly, by automating the data gathering that is needed to scale automation, and secondly, enabling process experts to encode and teach AI (Artificial Intelligence) to automate knowledge intensive processes. We are moving the needle on innovation and automation capabilities.

The IA (Intelligent Automation) Collective brings a group of specialists together that can address any aspect of intelligent automation for our clients, supplying technology and professional services for projects end-to-end. These initiatives aim to address the global skills shortage and the automation stagnation that many organisations are experiencing. Both initiatives have led to a good deal of interest from clients, and we are building on that. The list of technology partners is growing rapidly, adding top players like US based AYR (former Singularity) as well as leading cloud providers. We also enjoy a fast growing deployment and sales partner universe, covering all continents.

Sarah: What does 2023 hold?

Adam: I am delighted to say that KYP.ai is on a rapid growth trajectory and the range of use cases that our clients are implementing is growing well beyond our expectations! Business case driven insights for automation, process optimisation, workforce management, software application, end-user system performance, and customer experience as well as sustainability help to accelerate any transformation agenda. In 2023 we will see a proliferation of further hybrid office related use cases as more and more clients learn and co-create the future applications of KYP.ai and its potential to deliver more benefits. Because of recessionary pressures and inflation, we are poised for success, helping our clients to achieve more with less. What get’s measured gets done!

Sarah: Thank you Adam!

Adam: Thank you Sarah! I wish all readers a healthy and exciting 2023!