These were the “low-hanging fruits” of automation. They were easy to identify and highly impactful, providing a significant boost in productivity from the get-go. You simply observed or asked employees what they spent most of their time doing and turned those tasks over to automation .
However, as automation evolved, so did the needs oil and gas email list of organizations. Automation expanded from handling a single task to managing interconnected chains of tasks , creating holistic processes. This shift required businesses to determine not just what to automate, but which processes would deliver the highest return on investment (ROI) when automated.
But identifying these high-ROI opportunities isn't always straightforward. While automating repetitive tasks like thousands of copy-pastes was simple, uncovering more complex automation opportunities often felt like searching for a needle in a haystack. Everything, it seemed, could be automated to some extent. Yet, as the McKinsey Global Institute notes, while up to 50% of today's work activities could potentially be automated by 2035, figuring out where to focus automation efforts remains a challenge.