With business-to-business, business-to-customer and even customer-to-customer interactions becoming digitized, enterprises are taking the digital transformation route to gain a competitive edge.

Automation has emerged as a hot topic, because all these digital interactions need to be seamlessly connected, and autonomous operations fill this void. Even though the underlying technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning make automation a reality, they should not dominate the discussion because companies want to see tangible results, according to Drew Schulke (pictured), vice president of product management at Dell Technologies Inc.

“What we’ve seen just in the past year is when we do this and do it right, we’re seeing issue resolution times dropping by like 50 to 90%,” he explained. “We are seeing time spent on admin tasks reduced by like 85%, operation costs dropping by a third, and applications almost doubling.”

Schulke spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during a recent CUBE Conversation. They discussed how autonomous operations are digitizing enterprises and the importance of trust in automation. (* Disclosure below.)

Trust should be at the epicenter of automation

With automation being a journey, Schulke believes that trust comes in handy. Dell offers an autonomous operations framework comprising six automation levels intended to boost trust.

“Am I willing to hand over the keys … and you earn that by progressing up through these different levels? If I can’t trust you with conditional automation, I’m not going to trust you with full autonomy,” he said. “There’s a psychology involved that they have to progress through these levels, and so you have to be deliberate.”

Supply chains involve a heterogeneous environment, and automation fits in by providing configuration management or application orchestration, according to Schulke. Even though automation boils down to individual use cases, Schulke believes that a value-based approach should be taken into account in the overall design.

“We need to embrace a value-based approach, because what might be considered an acceptable set of circumstances for a financial services company might not be for a manufacturing company,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE