A school saves thousands of hours a year dealing with student admission forms.
A manufacturer streamlines management of customer complaints about shipping delays.
An accountant automates a business function, then offers the automation solution for sale via a store.
These are among the opportunities Nick Beaugeard, chief software architect of Sydney managed service provider TribeTech, is pursuing with the company’s new artificial intelligence connected business automation venture and product World of Workflows.
Despite years of business process automation, that story is far from over, and it’s grown more interesting with the emergence of generative AI.
“It’s a really cool tech space to be in, especially with the rise of AI and the fact we can integrate your business process and AI together without needing a coder anywhere near it,” Beaugeard told CRN Australia.
It's also providing another way for IT partners to evolve their businesses.
“Everybody knows that MSPs need to move up the value chain. We see this as a really nice way to go to customers and say, ‘Right, your IT is at a really good level. Security – we do all of that really well. Now, let's automate your business, let's actually start affecting the top and bottom line’,” Beaugeard said.
Beaugeard has been showing World of Workflows to large banks, a high-profile federal government agency, a large broadcaster, schools, an accounting practice, a media company and a manufacturer, among others.
He is also about to offer a way for fellow channel partners to get involved.
At the CRN Pipeline conference in August, he will launch a World of Workflows channel program and lead a session titled “Unleashing AI Power” in which he’ll talk about taking AI from an abstract concept to a tangible tool enabling business use cases.
Removing “annoying roadblocks”
World of Workflows is the result of “little annoying automation roadblocks”.
One roadblock was limitations on where data could be stored.
“A lot of people have gone out and built SaaS RPA and low code solutions, which is super nice, until you talk to someone who's really strict about where they keep their data,” Beaugeard said.
“We wanted something where we owned the whole stack."
"And as we started building it, we realised it's not just about RPA and it's not just about process, it's actually about data and where you store your data.”
TribeTech also saw a need for human interaction with automation processes.
“There's very few processes you can 100 percent automate,” Beaugeard said.
“And so we've been very careful to build a really smart task interface back to the team which allows the workflow developer to actually get human interaction, rather than stopping a process and breaking out and going to something else.”
Also on TribeTech’s agenda is monetisation – enabling customers to build and monetise the solutions they build with World of Workflows for such activities as complaints management or onboarding employees.
“We were talking to an accounting firm recently and they're adopting it because they see a way of solving problems in their firm, publishing those solutions in our store and actually making ongoing revenue from using it,” Beaugeard said.
Non-coders can use World of Workflows to draw business processes and automate them.
The product can “dive out to people and give them tasks and measure whether they're doing them and allow them to do them or not do them.”
It also plugs in to ChatGPT and other tools.
The result is an RPA, database, API, reporting and task management platform, with “rich extensibility” and a mechanism for customers to monetise automation solutions.
“Put it all together, and I think you have something bigger than the sum of the parts,” Beaugeard said.
Manual processing “everywhere”
TribeTech’s understanding of the automation needs of one profession in particular – accounting – ties to its purchase in 2020 of accounting software company HubOne, which Beaugeard founded.
“About 10 years ago, you’d find every suburban accountant was trying to automate what they were doing, and that kind of stopped,” he said.
Since then, Beaugeard has seen small to medium size accounting practices focus on moving to the cloud and to monthly billing.
“Now they’re revisiting [automation], but revisiting it with a different set of tools."
"They’re revisiting it with things like Xero and Xero Practice Manager and all these other SaaS applications and going, ‘Oh god, how do I pull these together and automate what my practice does?’”
In schools, Beaugeard sees manual processing of “everything from concussion management to health care, to who's allowed to go on an excursion, to getting notes to parents.”
He envisages ChatGPT and automation helping teachers “move away from a whole bunch of busy work…everything from lesson planning and grading and assessment scoring.”
He also sees a place for training ChatGPT to give students pointers on their draft essays.
The legal sector is also on his radar – “anything which has either financial or professional services, or indeed any area where you're copying data from one app to another, I think really, really works for this,” Beaugeard said.
“The whole point of computers is to automate what you do,” Beaugeard likes telling customers.
“And yet, if you walk into any airport lounge, you primarily see people copying data from one application to another – we kind of missed the boat, which is kind of why I'm really excited about this.”
Nick Beaugeard will present a session about making AI integration a breeze at the CRN Pipeline conference on the Gold Coast from August 22-24. He will illustrate incorporating AI into daily business processes, challenging the audience's perception of AI and encouraging them to embrace it as an inevitable and transformative force. See the CRN Pipeline agenda and get tickets.
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
