According to leading authorities on intelligent automation, Alan Pelz-Sharpe and Dan Lucarini, when tackling intelligent automation, companies need to remember the following:

• The core purpose of automation is to reduce human work activities.
• Automation entails digitising (encoding) work activities.
• Employees and customers will always be impacted by automation.

Automation requires − as a foundational step − a detailed understanding of the activities making up the business process that is to be automated; without this, the automation project will, in all likelihood, fail.