The imperatives for automation success

At a time when companies are increasingly embracing technologies such as robotic process automation, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence, and as companies' automation efforts mature, findings from our second McKinsey Global Survey on the topic show that the imperatives for automation success are shifting. The online survey was in the field from February 4 to February 14, 2020, and garnered responses from 1,179 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent's nation to global GDP. Two years ago our survey found that making business-process automation a strategic priority was conducive to success beyond the piloting stage. 2 2. We define business-process automation as the use of general-purpose technologies (for example, bots and algorithms) to perform work that was previously done manually, in order to improve the functionality of a company's underlying systems. In the survey, automation did not include the use of automation that was custom built (for example, Excel macros and custom scripts) for organizations.