Thursday, October 12, 2017

The Automation Solution

I have joined the amazing team at Catalytic, Inc. as Chief Customer Officer. Forgive me the brief "advertorial" -- but I hope to have a chance to work with every one in my network as we scale this product and business...
After 10 years in consulting I am returning to what I have done for most of my career joining a small innovative team building an amazing new technology that I hope will make an enormous impact for our customers, their employees, and eventually the world.
As an AI native company, everything about how the Catalytic team approaches software is infused with making machine intelligence a part of how people will become more productive, more successful, and more satisfied at doing their jobs.
As a SaaS company we have found a way to deliver this technology quickly and inexpensively so that our customers can achieve an immediate cost savings. And our ease of use -- eliminating the software developer from automation -- addresses the typical barriers that companies face: lack of internal talent, lack of understanding, no time for IT to implement, not sure where to start...
Our Intelligent Automation platform is designed to make it easy to use AI in business processes -- both providing easy access to capabilities that we have built and a marketplace of capabilities that we are packaging from hundreds of other innovative companies. The web based process builder allows business people to select from these "actions" and automate tasks to improve operations quality, data accuracy, compliance, overcome bottlenecks, and generate actionable insights.
Why do I call this the "automation solution?"
In working with clients over the past few years I have seen four big challenges to enterprise adoption of AI and automation, despite the enormous potential benefits to quality, cycle time, cost, etc.
  1. The economics of RPA are uncertain, initial costs are high -- ROI promises are too far in the future, maintenance and management expense is uncertain, and business continuity planning can easily swamp benefit cases;
  2. Many AI initiatives are inherently experiments since much of this work is being done for the first time ever -- tools are complex and require experts in technology who may not be experts in the business making it difficult to define path to benefit;
  3. Supply of experienced staff for implementation is limited -- both for process analysis and especially for automation development -- making it difficult to staff and scale automation initiatives;
  4. The approach to design and implementation is typically "top down" -- taking existing business processes and focusing solely on the release of headcount to achieve cost savings which makes employees and even managers uneasy about the technology thus delaying or even derailing initiatives.
Catalytic delivers a much-needed solution to this set of problems -- fast to implement, less expensive to maintain, and focused on enhancing how people and AI work together. We have a lot of work to do to achieve all of the promise of our new platform, but we are already at work with some amazing large companies in manufacturing, insurance, banking, real estate, and retail.
Catalytic. Work done better.
Hope to hear from you about how we can work together!

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