A notion exists that automation is not friendly because it is meant to take away people’s jobs. On the contrary, automation bridges the gap between maximizing workers’ capabilities and handling repetitive and mundane tasks.

By leveraging the services rendered by automation platform company UiPath Inc., Dentsu International has streamlined various product roadmaps since 2017.

Automation should be centered on elevating people’s potential because there is a gap between employees’ skills and what they actually do, according to Brian Klochoff (pictured, left), head of automation, Americas, at Dentsu International.

“So a testimonial about applying automation came from an employee in the mid-office who said, ‘I didn’t go $160,000 in student debt to copy-paste stuff from Excel into this proprietary platform that we use for media,’” he explained. “They wanted to do ‘Mad Men’ type stuff. They wanted to be the Don Drapers and the Peggy Olsons of our industry.”

Klochoff and James Droskoski (pictured, right), RPA senior sales director at UiPath, spoke with Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during UiPath’s Forward IV conference. They discussed how automation helps maximize workforce capabilities. (* Disclosure below.)

Automation should be people-centered

Automation should seek to make people’s work and day better regardless of factors like background, according to Droskoski. New technology should be about the impact and the change it creates. 

“Automation for good is about focusing on the people and how do we take the solutions and the programs and the technologies we have and make an impact so that somebody’s day is better, their job is better,” he said. “That process they’re doing is easier and they can focus on more of the things that make them different.”

Even though automation reduces costs and improves the bottom line, Droskoski believes this cutting-edge technology should focus on the people first because no process or system can be automated without humans.

Dentsu is now focusing on using automation to empower its employees while saving money and streamlining processes.

“What we’ve wanted to do over the past four years is find ways to elevate our people’s potential by integrating automation and AI into their actual day-to-day work,” Klochoff noted.

Automation enabled Dentsu’s employees to build solutions by incorporating skills, including training models using machine learning, from a detail-oriented perspective. Through robotic process automation  Dentsu was able to eliminate a pipeline backload of invoices by putting the right controls and connecting people from the mid-office to the back-office, according to Klochoff. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of UiPath’s Forward IV conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the UiPath’s Forward IV conference. Neither UiPath Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE