By Anupriya Ramraj, VP Cloud Services at Unisys.

Now more than ever, the business landscape has become more competitive and unpredictable. You need to move swiftly to ensure that citizens and customers have access to the right solutions at the right moment and time. And those solutions must be secure.

This can present itself as a major challenge due to growing cyber risks, higher customer expectations, the onslaught of data volume, variety and velocity, and the new demands created by our new touchless world.

At first glance, it seems hard to keep up with all of that on your own. Luckily, with artificial intelligence (AI)-led automation, you won’t have to. While we’re all aware that legacy automation tools require manual configuration and human supervision to make sure everything runs smoothly, AI is able to leverage computer systems to use the available data and imitate human intelligence and reasoning. By doing this, AI-led automation systems are able to learn, predict and suggest recommendations in terms of what to do next.

Some of the many benefits of AI-led automation can be seen under the form of risk reduction, increased agility and efficiency, and heightened innovation. Here are some top tips on how businesses can use AI-led automation to reach their true potential.

Reduce your threat level

Cloud misconfiguration breaches are costly for most organisations, resulting in approximately 5 trillion dollars lost between 2018 and 2019 alone. During this period, misconfigured cloud services have led to an estimated 200 breaches and exposed more than 30 billion records. This possibility for misconfiguration is now greater than ever, as more businesses have drastically accelerated the adoption of cloud amid the pandemic to ensure business continuity.

Additionally, Gartner found out that 99% of future cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault so there’s a limit to how much a human can grasp in terms of checking for misconfigurations. The same applies to your staff and the time they’re dedicating to rechecking configurations.

Through AI-led automation, the likelihood of breaches will be lowered, while at the same time, it will benefit people to focus on innovation by not having to do this tedious task.

Speed up your Go-To-Market

Rapid provisioning is becoming a predominant topic of discussion for many organisations. AI-led automation is a useful tool to make sure your environment is quickly set up in a secure and compliant way. What used to take months of manual coordination now can be achieved in a few hours.

For example, while working with a state agency facing integration issues, they were looking for a new method to move faster, even though they lacked internal cloud design, management expertise and had to follow complex compliance requirements. This was a good opportunity to introduce an AI-enabled chatbot and use automated scaling. At a time when unemployment is high, this cutting-edge solution facilitated the process of filing unemployment claims, thus helping millions of citizens.

Let’s not forget that many businesses are also taking advantage of the capabilities of AI-led automation. This was the case of a drug company which was able to innovate more quickly by using CI/CD pipeline automation and DevSecOps paradigms in order to speed up the process of finding drugs and vaccines.

Adopt Full-Stack Automation

People often think about automation in terms of provisioning, but the truth is that it can take many forms. Nowadays, you can easily automate all your daily cloud operations.

You can use automation to implement a software patch or create a backup. Or you can apply automation to validate your software applications too, along with regular scans of your code.

Discover your weak points early

Addressing software vulnerabilities as early as possible is crucial for many businesses. This is where automation is helpful as you can shift left on security, which is a key aspect of DevSecOps.

Nowadays, DevSecOps is adopted by many businesses to address the cloud’s diversity of computing and services, while AI is the ideal solution to ensure its scalability throughout your business.

Recent security breaches have further emphasised the importance of securing the entire software life cycle. AI-led automation and operations can easily help you with this by identifying any software security gaps as soon as they appear. As a result, your cybersecurity risks will be lowered by implementing an AI-led automation paired with a shift-left security strategy.

Skills shortages

This year, approximately 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs will go unfilled and fewer than a quarter of cybersecurity job candidates are qualified, according to MIT Technology Review.

Cloud security specialists are facing especially high levels of skills shortages. ESG analyst Jon Oltsik says, “With organisations developing more software, moving workloads to the public cloud, and facing more sophisticated threats, these shortages are disconcerting, to say the least.”

You can fill this cybersecurity gap by supplementing your tech talent with AI-led security automation.

Customise your offering

It’s important to make sure your solutions are customised and personalised to fulfill your customers’ unique needs. This is further supported by research from McKinsey, which found that retail marketing sales costs can be reduced by 10%-20% by adopting personalisation at scale, while also boosting retail customer loyalty, engagement and wallet share. And the good thing is that customisation and personalisation can be applied to any sector.

Delivering personalised services at scale might seem difficult when having thousands of customers. You can’t have as many associates as clients. Automation and AI can help you solve this issue by providing innovative solutions that are customised and personalised to users according to their business processes, industries, geographies, individual behaviours, pain points or other requirements.

Picking the right partners

Given today’s cloud security and innovation challenges, most businesses might need some help on these fronts.

It’s important to find partners with a proven capacity to deliver AI-led automation and help you become more agile, innovative, scalable and secure. AI-led automation makes things happen, leaving you with more time to focus on your customers’ and business goals.