Organisations have depended on conventional Business Process Services (BPS) models to drive operations for years. Such models traditionally relied on offshoring, expense reduction, and linear effort-based scaling to complete high volume repetitive tasks. In the current age of perpetual technological disruption, increased customer expectations, and changing market dynamics, these methods are increasingly falling short.
Companies today need more than just cost arbitrage – they need smarter operations that are highly attuned to customer needs unlocking new levels of operational excellence at an enterprise scale. This evolution has given rise to an emerging operating model: Intelligent Enterprise Operations. By its very nature, the model embodies the collaboration of human judgement and design thinking with artificial intelligence to revolutionize the ways in which business processes are executed.
President & Business Head – Intelligent Enterprise Operations, Mindsprint
Are traditional models becoming irrelevant?
The limitations of traditional BPS models are becoming apparent, with organisations encountering four key challenges under these legacy models:
- Data Silos: Information remains fragmented across disparate systems, preventing businesses from gaining a holistic view.
- Lack of real-time insights: Decisions are based on historical data rather than real-time insights, leading to missed opportunities.
- Lack of Agility: Traditional BPS models are too rigid to adapt quickly to market shifts.
- Manual Overload: Repetitive, manual tasks consume valuable time and resources.
These limitations highlight the urgent need for a paradigm change in the approach – one that’s specifically designed for the modern business landscape.
AI adoption is already on a steeply rising trajectory. A recent study shows that 72% of respondent companies now use AI in some form or the other, up from 50% in previous years. Additionally, 75% expect generative AI to disrupt their industries soon.
Intelligent Enterprise Operations: The Next Step in the BPS Evolution
Intelligent Enterprise Operations represent the next generation of business process services. With an AI-first approach built on a human-centred AI-driven culture, AI-enabled processes, and AI-powered digital solutions, IEO empowers enterprises to future-proof their operations in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
This model of operation synthesizes five key elements:
- Domain Expertise: Extensive functional and process expertise across business functions like finance operations, taxation, supply chain, procurement, manufacturing, risk & compliance, human resources, and customer support.
- Delivery Excellence: Commitment to customer-centric flexibility and noise-less delivery coupled with prioritization of “Value” over “Volume”.
- Data Analytics: Analyse structured and unstructured data at scale to predict trends, prescribe improvements and build interactive dashboards with automated insights to enable real-time data-driven actions.
- Process discovery: Employing process and task mining techniques, analytics, AI-led digital value stream studies and operational excellence frameworks for identifying when and how to optimally integrate human ingenuity and efforts, with intelligent automation.
- Intelligent automation: Automate identified processes through fit-for-purpose rule-based systems, traditional AI/ML to advanced AI technologies (Gen/Agentic AI) for achieving hyper efficiencies at scale.
The outcome is an operating model that is both scalable and responsive to an ever-changing environment.
A systematic approach to effective transformation: Discover & Transform
Implementing smarter operations demands a well-orchestrated transformational journey – strategically segmented into two phases “Discovery” and “Transformation”
- The Discovery Phase
This stage focuses on understanding current operations, identifying inefficiencies, and determining what should be improved through automation or lean/six sigma initiatives. It involves evaluating the maturity level of current processes and technology, capturing real-world workflows with process mining tools, identifying data on bottlenecks and unnecessary steps, and mapping where human skills are most effective and where technology adoption will realize more value.
- The Transformation Phase
Once organisations understand the current landscape, they can move towards designing the operations of the future. This stage typically includes implementing customized automation solutions through a strong Hyper Automation CoE for scaling solutions responsibly and securely and putting in place ongoing monitoring and feedback systems to ensure continuous optimisation.
Intelligent Enterprise Operations require a data-centric foundation, seamlessly embedded in the operating model to fuel AI powered digital solutions and real-time insight driven actions which in tandem with functional expertise and delivery best practices will realize tangible results such as efficiency improvement and cycle time reduction for critical business processes.
What success really looks like
- 40–60% reduction in process cycle time
- Over 50% increase in efficiency
- Automation of 70–90% of manual operations across targeted processes
- Unstructured data converted into structured insights to accelerate downstream processes
The final measure of success goes beyond improving operations. It is about building organisations that can continuously evolve, adapt quickly, and compete effectively in an ever-changing world.
The future of work will be human and AI combined
The future of business operations will not be powered by technology alone. It will belong to organisations that can balance the unique strengths of humans, such as creativity, empathy, and judgement, with the capabilities of machines, such as speed, scale, and precision.
Intelligent Enterprise Operations provide a vision of this future. They elevate operations from an enabling function to a strategic driver of growth, resilience, and innovation. Organisations that succeed in this transition will become more human while doubling down on efficiency.
-G Venkataramanan (GV) is the President & Business Head – Intelligent Enterprise Operations at Mindsprint
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