Top 5 lessons learned from intelligent automation: Jon Theurekauf

The AI & Intelligent Automation Network asks key practitioners for five lessons learned from their intelligent automation journey

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

First up is Former Managing Director & Group Head of Performance Excellence, Jon Theurekauf.

Looking back at a successful career in operational excellence, Jon began his journey establishing his own company in his twenties and later joined General Electric (GE), where he gained insight and experience under the leadership of Jack Welch.

When asked about intelligent automation, Theurekauf said, “we're building a virtual workforce cloud base to help us take on work that for many, many years we've known that if we had another way of doing it, we would fix the underlying platforms that lie underneath the floor.”

Meaning, intelligent automation is able to take on the workload that before now simply could not be executed. In the past, implementing the next technological advancement has meant severe disruption to the organization.

“The beauty with [intelligent automation] tools is that you always have an audit trail"

“The beauty with [intelligent automation] tools is that you always have an audit trail. I can see what Alex [the intelligent automation agent for BNY Mellon] is doing when ‘he’ runs from 10 o'clock in the morning ‘til noon.  I can go back and look at every transaction complete or incomplete and discover where they went.”

Theurekauf is able to deploy intelligent automation agents and execute work not being done by humans. But better than that, he’s able to do so without disrupting his human workforce.

AIIA Network Editor Seth Adler caught up with Jon Theurekauf in this recent podcast interview:

Theurekauf shares his top 5 lessons learned in intelligent automation:

1. Before you build anything, truly understand the current state of your process(es), technology and data architecture (the old Enterprise or Business Architecture framework) and map the people on to that.

2. Define the problems or opportunities you are trying to solve, then clearly define the end state for what good should look like, and then take a "Stratical" approach to get there.

3. Don't pick tools or go building solutions before doing #1 and #2

4. Don't do #3 before putting your governance structure for this new way of working with "bots" or other automation in the process(es)

5. You won't succeed if you are afraid to fail and if you're not failing, then you're not innovating and if you're not innovating, you're getting lapped.  

Catch up on the series:

Top 5 lessons learned from intelligent automation: Nick Burgess

Top 5 lessons learned from intelligent automation: Cindy Gallagher