Warner Bros. Discovery

With 15 million dollars of forecasted savings until 2025, we can feel very proud of our RPA journey. But as every time we have to deal with emerging technologies, the beginning was not easy.

In 2018, before going through several M&As when we were still Turner, I pitched and obtained the funding to start with the RPA implementation. The potential benefits and multiple use cases where it can be applied made it clear that it was a framework that could transform and streamline business processes, positioning IT as a key change enabler.

Resistance to change

However, finding the right business partner without an existing internal success story made it very challenging. The first reactions were that efficiencies were tied to lay-offs, resulting in resistance to change and lack of collaboration.

Building diverse teams is a crucial success factor. As an IT leader, hiring people with a business background for some roles and teaching them technology skills can help position IT as a strategic partner. IT roles can perfectly understand processes running on applications, but blended roles with business and technology skills can have more insights into what happens outside the applications and a different approach with our stakeholders

That position gave us the knowledge to suggest opportunities for improvement in business processes resulting in value transformation initiatives. The focus was on reducing manual intervention and increasing the time destinated to analysis. That led to revenue increase and role redefinitions. Lead cases like that demonstrated that both, company and employees could be beneficial from automation.

  ​Building Diverse Teams Is A Crucial Success Factor. As An It Leader, Hiring People With A Business Background For Some Roles And Teaching Them Technology Skills Can Help Position It As A Strategic Partner 

Other process optimizations allowed for increasing the team’s performance without adding more people. These days, where we see many companies’ massive lay-off announcements, what was considered first a potential source to reduce the workforce, was a solution to protect them and address work peaks.

The first areas were acting as ambassadors, and we moved from pitching to areas to deal with a growing pipeline, resulting in a global Automation Center of Excellence with an established framework, governance, and change management process.

Lead the change

I use the term silver-collar to identify the use of bots or AI as part of the workforce.

When multiple areas began to adopt automation in their processes, we saw an interesting behavior. For automations running for many years, it’s usual that the original team changed or was no longer part of the organization. We have seen processes running by our silver-collars without enduser trained to run them manually in case of failure.

Bots do not take vacations but can fail. And in the same way a vacation replacement needs to be planned, end-users need to be trained to take over silver-collars’ activities that cannot be performed. It was necessary to adapt the change management process to include revisions so that teams are prepared and trained to run on exceptions manually.

Many years were required to adopt automation solutions to complement teams and processes, replacing repetitive or lowvalue but mandatory activities.

But now, we are witnesses to a new phase.

ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or any other similar AI solutions are creating the idea that many roles can be replaced entirely. And not only the repetitive task.

In the mid-term, IT leaders will have to lead this new change, helping to transform their companies and organizational roles by combining the workforce and maximizing results.