Riyadh – Mubasher: Intelligent automation (IA) is expected to double the economy of Saudi Arabia to $1.6 trillion through the addition of $293 billion by 2030, according to a research by Automation Anywhere.
The Kingdom also has an opportunity to drive technology-led productivity through IA deployments, a research from Ernst and Young (EY) noted. IA is a combination of robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up digital transformation.
The EY modeller indicated optimistic, moderate, and conservative scenarios for the impact of incremental automation adoption across all Saudi sectors, if adoption reaches 50%, it will add $293 billion to the nominal gross domestic product (GDP); 30% will contribute $184 billion; while 15% will add $103 billion to the nominal GDP.
Industries that include state services, the public sector, banking, insurance, energy, and materials offer “the best opportunities” to maximize IA while achieving the Saudi Vision 2030 goals, according to the research.
Promoting private and public partnerships for the country’s vision forms a strategic framework to reduce the Kingdom’s dependence on oil, diversify its economy, and develop public service sectors like health, education, infrastructure, recreation, and tourism.
Vice President and Head of Digitisation and Automation at Bank Aljazira, Faisal Al Rashoudi, said: “Intelligent automation will serve as a virtual workforce executing the repetitive and mundane tasks, allowing organizations to redeploy their workforce with improved skills and advanced productivity than ever before.”
He added, “Thus, we envision building a Center of Excellence on process automation through the adoption of emerging technologies in intelligent automation to help accelerate and achieve our transformation goals and objectives in line with the overall bank’s strategy.”
Enablers that accelerate IA include speeding up the digital transformation of government entities and private companies by increasing fast and secure services through the cloud. This is in addition to more training and development in digital skills, as well as enhancing a stronger ecosystem of startups, enterprises, government, and academia to drive innovation.
Executive Vice President, IMEA, Automation Anywhere, Milan Sheth, commented, saying: “The economic disruption of COVID-19 caused a temporary slowdown; however, our customers have used this opportunity to accelerate their digital transformation journey and made their business more resilient with our award-winning cloud RPA platform.”
