What are Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT)?

 Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT), represents the most recent innovation in the field of automation and is emerging as the solution that will lead this market in the coming years. This type of software platform integrates business process automation and coordination functionalities, combining technologies such as RPA, BPA and iPaaS with generative artificial intelligence, intelligent document processing and low-code application development.

The key feature of BOAT is that it enables users to automate, coordinate and optimize business processes comprehensively and autonomously. This extends the scope of automation beyond individual tasks, facilitating the intelligent orchestration of entire business processes, the integration of heterogeneous applications and systems, and providing support for real-time decision making using generative AI and process mining.

At the Gartner Application Innovation & Business Solutions Summit 2024, held in mid-May in Las Vegas, Gartner introduced this concept to describe the ongoing convergence of automation technologies and advanced capabilities. The renowned analyst firm highlights how these developments form the core components of modern platforms.

Key Features of Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies

1. Core components: Combines fundamental elements of RPA, BPA and iPaaS into a single software platform.

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA), within the context of orchestration and business automation platforms, addresses repetitive, rule-based tasks. Using software robots (bots), actions that traditionally required human intervention—such as clicking, typing, copying, pasting, moving files, and extracting data from documents—are automated. These bots interact seamlessly with digital applications to perform these tasks. In the broader framework of BOAT, RPA goes beyond simple task automation by integrating with business processes.

• Business Process Automation (BPA), offers a broader, more strategic approach than RPA. It enables the automation of complex, end-to-end business processes across multiple departments and systems. Organizations can leverage low-code or no-code interfaces to design, implement, and optimize these processes. BPA goes beyond basic automation by providing tools for real-time KPI monitoring, advanced process analysis, and continuous, data-driven optimization. Within the BOAT platform, BPA ensures that business processes become more efficient, agile, and adaptable.

• Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) serves as the connective tissue, offering a cloud-based solution to streamline integration across diverse systems. This integration layer enables seamless connections between cloud applications and on-premise systems, facilitating data and process orchestration across multiple endpoints. Within BOAT, IPaaS simplifies the implementation and management of complex integrations.

2. Integrated capabilities:

• Process orchestration: Refers to the automated coordination and management of complex processes that involve multiple systems, applications, and resources. It includes defining, sequencing, and monitoring tasks to achieve a predefined objective. A key differentiator of an orchestration and automation platform is its AI-driven autonomy. With generative AI agents, these platforms can handle complex tasks that once required human intervention, optimize workflows through continuous learning from data, adjust processes in real time, and even automatically generate new processes.

• Enterprise connectivity: Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies enable seamless communication between cloud and on-premises systems, allowing organizations to unify their technology ecosystems without compromising security or performance.

• Intelligent Document Processing (IDP): Uses a combination of AI technologies such as Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to automate document-related tasks. This includes capture, classification, extraction, validation and intelligent management of structured and unstructured data.

• Process Mining and Task Mining: Combine complementary approaches to analyzing and optimizing business operations. Process mining analyzes records and data from business systems to identify, reconstruct, and map existing processes. In contrast, task mining focuses on individual activities, assessing how users interact with information systems and identifying opportunities for automation at the task level.

• Process design, optimization and discovery: Provides tools to visualize, improve and discover business processes, facilitating the creation of efficient workflows.

• GEN AI: The integration of generative AI represents a significant advance towards autonomous automation by incorporating specific capabilities such as prompt-driven design, workflow design, content generation, unstructured data mining and coordination of multiple LLMs. It also enhances automation tools by providing intelligence, autonomy and adaptability in process execution and management. The latter helps automate complex tasks that previously required human intervention -document comprehension, sentiment analysis, fraud detection and decision making-, optimize processes by learning from data and feedback, and create new processes by generating workflows, rules and actions based on the objectives established by the business (strategic, operational, quality and service, and compliance and regulatory).

3. End-to-end automation: Refers to the complete automation of a business process, covering all stages, from data entry to the final actions. This ensures seamless integration and management of every phase, eliminating the need for manual intervention. Key aspects include full task automation, guaranteed integration of all systems and applications involved, and the implementation of workflows that support continuous, uninterrupted task execution.

4. Unified user experience: Offers a consistent, intuitive interface for all users, regardless of their technical expertise. It promotes collaboration between business and IT teams within a shared workspace, with customization options based on roles and preferences. This ensures each user can access the necessary functionalities tailored to their needs.

5. Advanced architecture: BOAT is built on cutting-edge technology infrastructure, featuring low-code/no-code development for rapid application and workflow creation, cloud-native architecture for scalability and flexibility, and integrated cognitive capabilities like AI and Machine Learning. It also includes autonomous process orchestration driven by business rules and an event-based monitoring system for automatic detection and response to market changes.

The role of AI in BOAT platforms

• Boosting autonomy: AI plays a crucial role in advancing orchestration and automation platforms by enhancing the autonomy and adaptability of processes.

• Real-time optimization: Using data and results, processes are optimized in real time by adjusting the logic and operating parameters.

• Advanced automation and assisted generation: Generative AI agents perform a wide variety of actions, such as generating personalized content, designing adaptive workflows and automating complex tasks.

• Intelligent orchestration: AI agents coordinate multiple tasks and dynamically adapt to variations in data and the market. 

Why Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies is critical for enterprises 

– Improve operational efficiency: By automating and optimizing processes, companies reduce errors, eliminate redundancies and streamline operations.

– Increase business agility: Adapt quickly to changing market and business conditions.

– Maximize profitability: Automation and improved efficiency lead to a significant reduction in operating costs.

– Optimize the decision-making process: Access to real-time data and advanced analytics empowers management teams to make more informed decisions.

– Improve customer experience: Implementing more efficient and personalized processes improves customer experience.

Implications of Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies for enterprise operations 

• Market consolidation: BOAT has facilitated the consolidation of various automation technologies, enabling companies to choose solutions that reduce operational complexity and costs associated with using multiple systems.

• Autonomous automation: Automation is moving towards an autonomous model, supported by the impact of AI that optimizes process execution and improves decision making.

• Technology unification: Companies can leverage a single software platform to meet various automation and integration needs, enabling a more streamlined approach. .

• Cross-departmental collaboration: Orchestration and automation technologies promote collaboration between IT and other business areas, resulting in smoother implementation of automation initiatives..

• Continuous adaptability: AI capabilities facilitate continuous process adaptation and optimization, enabling agile responses to changes in the operating framework and fostering ongoing workflow improvement.