The 2026 process automation guide: Setting the right priorities

Understanding process automation

• Process automation uses technology to replace manual, repetitive tasks that require significant employee time but minimal thought.

• Modern digital process automation leverages software, bots and AI to create electronic workflows, intelligent document capture and automated decision-making.

• Organizations now view process automation as essential for staying competitive.

Key benefits and applications

• Process automation drives optimized processes, reduces manual effort, boosts productivity, improves accuracy and enhances scalability across industries.

• It can be leveraged for a variety of tasks across diverse industries, including healthcare, financial services and government.

• Real-world implementations show dramatic results: Investment firms cut invoice processing from 30 days to same-day turnaround, saving $1 million annually.

Types of process automation and the future with AI

• The future of process automation is being shaped by AI.

• Process automation technologies span a spectrum of tools, from simpler types that automate fixed, preprogrammed workflows like robotic process automation (RPA) to intelligent solutions that can use the power of AI and agents to apply human-like intelligence to processes like intelligent document processing (IDP).

• Hyland's AI-powered solutions like Hyland IDP and Hyland Automate achieve higher automation levels through optical character recognition, intelligent classification, and continuous learning capabilities.

What is process automation?

Process automation is the use of technology to replace manual, repetitive tasks done by humans. It is normally applied to processes that require lots of employee time, but little thought. Types of process automation include business process automation, intelligent process automation and workflow automation.

Early process automation looked like Henry Ford’s famous assembly line and used massive machinery. Today’s digital process automation (DPA) involves electronic workflows, document routing, intelligent capture and even content analysis and decision-making. Modern process automation technology uses software, bots and — most recently — artificial intelligence (AI) to improve business efficiency.

The question is no longer: "Is process efficiency technology worth the investment?"

It's: "Can an organization keep up without it?"

For most organizations, investing in process efficiency will be imperative to keeping up with competition and customer expectations. Intelligent automation initiatives alone were active or underway in 88% of respondents’ organizations in a recent Market Momentum Index: Intelligent Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Data survey, conducted by Deep Analysis with support from Hyland. This indicates that not only are organizations leaning into process automation, but they’re also interested in advancing the sophistication of their tools.

“As process automation increasingly integrates into AI programs, the potential for radical change grows,” Gartner said in its 2025 Market Guide for Business Process Automation Tools report.

Benefits of process automation

Process automation benefits organizations by driving speed and accuracy. It can also create a better work environment and customer service atmosphere.

More benefits include

• Optimized processes: When set up correctly, process automation provides an efficient and well-organized workflow. In manual processes, employees often create quick fixes to keep the workflow moving. These Band-Aids typically end up creating process challenges as they scale.

• Reduction of manual effort: If your workflow requires someone to read documents and enter data, process automation will save you time. It is possible AI can even make decisions about the next steps. 

• Boosted productivity and innovation: The automation of rote tasks enables your team to focus on more business-critical tasks. This could include innovating or providing high-touch value to customers.

• Improved accuracy: Manual processes often introduce errors, and even small errors in data can prove costly. Automated processes follow rules and flag anything that doesn’t fit parameters.  When you pair your process automation solution with AI, the AI will learn to problem-solve these issues itself.

• Reduced costs: A fast, accurate and fine-tuned process eliminates inefficiencies. This leads to cost savings that you can reinvest in priority areas.

• Stricter compliance: Standardized, consistently performed processes mean better compliance. A solution that provides automated audit trails saves time and helps prove compliance. 

• Improved scalability:  For enterprises with seasonal peaks or those experiencing rapid periods of growth, automated processes can easily compensate for the increased workload.

• Great entry point for bringing AI into your workplace: From intelligent capture to the machine learning that helps optimize your processes and outcomes, AI allows you to continually improve while keeping all the benefits of automation.

Process automation can be used in essentially any industry and across many departments, and the application of the technology is expansive. Here are just a few process automation use cases to give you an idea of how organizations make use of it:

Healthcare

Large healthcare organizations receive millions of patient documents and medical records a year. These files need to be quickly classified to enable optimal care decisions.

For one major provider, automating the medical records classification process with intelligent capture, extraction and validation technology changed lives, for both patients and providers. Data was accurately brought into the system early, then moved by bots to the correct places and put in front of the right people. Consequently, records became accessible faster than ever possible when processed manually.

> Read the case study | How an academic health system decreased turnaround times

Financial services

Bots, like those used in robotic process automation (RPA), can easily identify data on mortgage lending documentation, replicate it to the appropriate places and advance it in the loan origination system, underwriting and any other systems that require it.

> Read more | Hyland expert on the power of intelligent automation in banking

Government

A county auditor office had six staffers manually complete 90,000 personal property tax returns. They did this for nearly half the year, every year.

They then brought in a system-agnostic RPA system. This automated the repetitive, tedious task of entering tax return data into their system. Using conditional business rules, RPA even helped flag erroneous or fraudulent data that was then sent to a human auditor for review. In year one of this system, the county processed one-third of its returns with zero human touchpoints.

> Read the case study | Horry County’s process automation success story

Education

Indiana State University (ISU) faced challenges with its existing third-party solutions for campus operations, including slow performance and limited functionality, particularly in financial aid processing.

To address these issues, ISU implemented Hyland Automate, a cloud-native tool that seamlessly integrates with ISU's existing Hyland Perceptive Content system. Automate enables dynamic forms with digital signatures and conditional field displays, improving efficiency and user experience.

By replacing its legacy forms solution, ISU has overcome limitations such as inflexibility and poor integration. The university plans to expand Automate's use to other departments, streamlining workflows and enhancing operational efficiency across the institution.

> Read the case study | Indiana State University transformed how it managed forms and processes

Learn how Indiana State University leveraged Hyland’s cloud native solution to improve operational efficiency.

> Read the case study |  Indiana State University transformed how it managed forms and processes

North America's largest iron ore pellet producer struggled with decentralized, paper-based operations for its 360,000 annual invoices, which caused slow processing and limited visibility. The company implemented Hyland AP automation solutions to centralize and automate its accounts payable operations. Now, vendor-specific templates enable the system to automatically extract and upload invoice data, eliminating duplicate efforts and routing all invoices to the company's headquarters.

This shift to intelligent automation delivered profound financial benefits. The system provides enterprise-wide visibility that assigns a value to each invoice and ensures all available early payment discounts are captured. This update in systems created $5 million in annual savings. Eliminating manual data entry also minimized human error and increased capacity, allowing the AP department to process more invoices with fewer resources and reassign nearly half its staff to higher-value roles.

> Read the case study | Natural resource mining company saves $5 million with AP automation

As automation solutions evolve, we like to remember Sir Isaac Newton’s observation: “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

Process automation can employ a range of automation technologies, from relatively simple to highly advanced, including today’s most modern technologies that use AI. It is important to remember that your organization’s use case and requirements will often dictate the right automation solution. The good news is there are many available options. There is the right tool for every job, and some jobs may even require several automation technologies working together.

Let’s take a look at some of the options at your disposal:

Business process automation (BPA)

Business process automation (BPA) helps unify and automate repeatable business activities and services. It improves the accuracy, efficiency, visibility and compliance of core business tasks on a day-to-day basis.

Intelligent process automation (IPA)

Intelligent process automation (IPA) revolutionizes organizational processes and eliminates users' daily robotic tasks. Instead, AI-infused bots complete that rote work. IPA speeds up work, decreases manual errors and simplifies interactions.

Intelligent document processing (IDP)

Intelligent document processing (IDP) is an AI-powered digital solution that goes beyond the fixed capabilities of RPA and optical character recognition (OCR). IDP uses AI to read and understand the text and formatting within semistructured and unstructured content. This ability enables forms and documents to be processed automatically.

While legacy IDP applications used machine learning (ML)  technology to “teach" the IDP software how to make sense of documents, next-generation IDP solutions leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to go from basic text recognition to deep document understanding and reasoning.

Workflow automation

Workflow automation is the process of automating manual tasks, documentation and data flows using rules and logic. A workflow itself is a sequence of tasks that must be completed in a specific order to achieve an objective.

> Learn more | A guide to digital asset management workflows

Robotic process automation

RPA uses a software with bots to drive business efficiency and accuracy by automating and standardizing repeatable business tasks. It mimics predictable human behavior within a system, such as completing the clicks a worker would make in a standardized workflow).

> Learn more | 50+ RPA use cases

Application integration

Direct integration between two or more applications can also be a great way to automate data-centric tasks without requiring any human touch.

Agentic process automation

Agentic process automation is the next level of intelligent automation, leveraging AI agents to perform complex tasks or even entire business processes autonomously or semi-autonomously, without pre-determined scripting. If needed, AI agents can work with humans, other AI agents, and even use systems integrations, software applications, and other non-agentic tools and automation technologies in order to complete the task.

Agentic process automation does not need to replace every other automation technology in your organization. In fact, supplementing your existing automation strategy with AI agents can be the quickest way to create value with this next-generation technology.

Using AI technologies, agentic process automation can reshape how you do business by helping reduce human intervention and drive smarter decisions. With tools that orchestrate AI-powered agents, you can build and deploy AI agents, as well as add AI components, services, agents and RPA bots to your processes.

> Learn more | Explore the power of AI agents

Early generations of process automation solutions lack the capabilities of today’s AI-powered options. Simply put: Artificial intelligence changes everything.

With the maturation of AI, organizations can expand their horizons on what is automatable.

Process automation opportunities used to be limited to repeatable, programmable pathways. With AI, it can now be applied to unstructured, dynamic processes. Where it once required human review and intervention, today, accurate processing can be taught to machines. These machines can then learn to be even more human-like as they work, while still delivering higher accuracy at a greater speed.

The fusion of AI with process automation drastically increases the value and impact organizations gain from their efforts to expand automation.

Processes that depend on a historical knowledgebase — that alarming situation that happens when institutional knowledge is locked up with one person, for example — can be dramatically improved with AI. An AI automation solution can not only access and comprehend vast, intricate data from previous situations, but it can also draw insight and conclusions from that data.

“Investing in artificial intelligence for growth, efficiency and competitiveness isn't a leap of faith anymore, but a strategic necessity for businesses,” said Tiago Cardoso, principal product manager at Hyland. “Rapidly evolving AI technologies can pose significant risk to organizations that fail to adopt them. Being late to the AI game may mean not just missing out on opportunities, but could also risk businesses becoming obsolete, unable to keep pace with AI-enabled competitors.”

“Instead of replacing people outright, AI can replace the parts of their work that slow them down,” wrote Jitesh S. Ghai, Hyland CEO, in a recent article at Fast Company. “We just need to use it strategically.”

And many organizations are. In fact, Deep Analysis found that “the use of intelligent automation and AI seems to be driving organizations to consider ripping up their existing enterprise application stack.”

For example, a significant majority of respondents were planning to replace core systems:

• 74% said they would be willing or very willing to replace their ERP system with an AI-enabled alternative

• 82% said the same about their ECM/document management system

In short, the question shouldn’t be “How can we eliminate jobs with AI?”—instead, leaders on the right track should be asking: “What’s the technology we need to help our teams do their most meaningful work?”

> Learn more | 10 insights into the future of intelligent automation

Hyland's intelligent process automation solutions transform how enterprises operate by seamlessly digitizing business processes, optimizing workflows and empowering teams with the insights they need to work smarter and faster.

With AI-powered automation at its core, Hyland delivers measurable results. Our comprehensive automation tools don't just eliminate manual tasks — they empower you with intelligent workflows that adapt to your organization's unique needs while providing the scalability and security enterprise leaders demand.

Hyland automation tools:

• Hyland RPA: Delivers a comprehensive robotic process automation suite that uses low-code drag-and-drop tools to provide true end-to-end automation for predictable tasks.

• Hyland IDP: Uses advanced AI to automate document capture, extraction and classification, enabling efficient and accurate data processing.

• Hyland Automate: Leverages AI-enabled automation to simplify complex processes, reduce manual tasks and boost operational efficiency.

• Hyland Agent Builder: Builds an intelligent agentic workforce to drive smarter processes and implement AI at scale.

Hyland’s suite of automation tools provides human-like intelligence to the process automation workflow. By removing the slower, less accurate human touch points in those traditional processes, Hyland helps you improve efficiencies and accuracy, while enabling your use of AI-powered technology.

Start your process automation journey intelligently. Chat with Hyland today.