The aspirational target state for a cognitive system is to “take responsibility” for a domain (e.g., an autonomous car). To reach that level of sophistication, the system must achieve high levels of maturity simultaneously along two dimensions: Reasoning ability and Automation ability.
Reasoning ability:
There are four levels of maturity (or sophistication)
- Descriptive: What has happened? (hindsight)
- Diagnostic: Why did it happen? (insight)
- Predictive: What will happen? (foresight)
- Prescriptive: What should I do about it? (foresight)
With prescriptive level of maturity, a cognitive system can answer the questions: What to do? When to do? Why to do? In fact, with prescription, the system can “prevent” or “eliminate” issues through proactive actions.
Generative AI (GenAI) is making it possible for cognitive systems to advance their maturity levels from descriptive all the way to prescriptive. On one hand, it is enabling extracting domain and situational knowledge present in a wide variety of structured and unstructured data sources such as user guides, manuals, events, metrics, logs, incidents, change requests, etc. On the other hand, it is advancing the human-agentic interfaces to enable machines to augment their knowledge with intelligent conversations with human experts.
Automation ability:
- Perform tasks – using point or task automation solutions (e.g., OCR tools to extract text from images, monitor an SAP environment, etc.)
- Perform activities (or end-to-end processes, defined as a composition of tasks) – two levels of sophistication
- Robotic automation – relies upon fully-prescribed and fixed composition logic. Works well only when the process steps are context-independent and don’t change over time.
- Intelligent automation – where the end-to-end procedure for performing the activity is inferred and constructed dynamically based on the context (much like how humans carry out activities … e.g., meeting someone for coffee – the procedure depends upon where you are such as where is the coffee shop, and the procedure is constructed on-the-fly using the context and some reasoning patterns and skills).
The intelligent automation ability allows the cognitive system to “adapt” to changes and context quickly (a lot like humans) . This is essential for building “sustainable automation”.
ignio™: Achieving high levels of maturity on both axes
Agentic orchestration is making it possible for cognitive systems to advance both axes of reasoning and automation. With the ability to intelligently orchestrate various agents, it is accelerating the process of creating cognitive systems that can perceive, reason, act, and learn.
While most products in the market are attempting to achieve higher levels of maturity along one of the two dimensions, ignio, Digitate’s SaaS platform, is designed to achieve a high-level of maturity simulatenously along both of these dimensions and is well-suited to “take responsibilites”.
By having an AI-driven transformational impact on IT and business operations, Digitate has changed how enterprises work. Digitate has prevented disruptions in global supply chains, improved customer experience and employee retention, enhanced patient care, increased business assurance, reduced airline and airport delays, and improved payment processing.
The journey of enterprise operations
Enterprise IT operations have undergone a journey from process-driven to data-centric to machine-first:
- Catalogued: The first phase was to standardize by cataloging services, assets, people, activities; and ensuring auditability.
- Assisted: The next phase was to improve productivity of service providers by automating tasks and activities.
- Profiled: The phase after that improved speed by enabling context-aware operations. This is enabled by providing deep and cross-silo visibility and managing a single source of truth.
- Intelligent: This was then followed by improved quality. The effectiveness of the service is enhanced by bringing in intelligence to determine what actions to take, when to take them, and why they’re necessary.
- Autonomous: And the most mature stage is to handle situations autonomously delivering smarter, faster, and lighter operations.
To learn about how Digitate can transform your IT operations, schedule a demo with us today.
