All business eyes seem to be focused on the current challenges of an unsteady economic environment, and organizational leaders are working to figure out the best plan to overcome them. Leaders have their own collection of key initiatives as no two companies are the same. Most commonly; however, they want to double capacity and productivity, cut costs, enhance customer experiences, and future-proof their organizations.

President Casey Murray of the Southwest Airlines Pilot Association in February 2023 made it very clear that the airline’s outdated technology had failed miserably during the winter storm of 2022. And that the IT and “infrastructure from the 1990s” allowed the wild weather to destroy travel plans for thousands of Southwest passengers, keeping them from spending the holidays with family, friends, and loved ones.

Are business outcomes, with the potential to make or break an organization’s future, becoming more important than they’ve ever been before? It sure seems that way. Embarking on the journey of business growth despite a treacherous path of challenges, all departments are biting at the bit for stability, solid strategies, and a reliable plan for what’s ahead.

The more people realize the many ways automation makes their jobs easier, the more they want to apply it – and not just in IT, but across business departments and for multiple processes. By 2025, Gartner predicts: IT individuals have been taking advantage of automation for at least 10 years, but as the stats show, organizations as a whole are gravitating toward the value automation can bring.

User expectations — those of employees and customers alike — are turning up the heat for businesses and their IT departments. Could the demand for nonstop, fast, and basically flawless digital services be any higher?

Organizations lean on IT as the foundational force for helping the business succeed, even more so when stakes are high, and the future is unpredictable. Considering the countless tasks and processes carried out in IT, automation is no longer a nice to have. It’s a requirement for starting, and maintaining, a system of consistency that supports the business through instability and uncertainty.

A leading mobile communications company, based in South Africa, had big plans for its growth in the upcoming months. To ensure customer loyalty as they continued to grow their subscribers, they had to make sure their networks evolved while maintaining performance. That meant the organization’s IT and network teams needed a way to support business goals for growth with their existing capacity.

It’s one of the main use cases fit for network automation: the load balancer sanity reboot. Not to be left to manual executions, this long, tiresome task creates too much possibility for errors. Negative effects like unnecessary time and money spent are detriments that organizations can avoid, simply by automating the types of tasks—like load balancer sanity reboots—that include loads of repetitive steps.

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t the only thing at the heart of what organizations are doing to keep with digital transformation and drive business growth. People are, too. Development of AI actually began about 40 years ago, but for generative AI (genAI), that time is much less. The explosion of genAI has brought about an everlasting, first-of-its-kind innovation that’s accessible to just about everyone.

Any organization that’s keeping up with today’s sharp rise in business demands (or better yet, getting ahead of the game) is doing so by getting innovative and jumping at the chance to do things differently. They’re not relying on the old ways or trying to use their existing toolbox. Instead, organizations are looking to the newest technologies and means of adding efficiency to as many day-to-day functions as possible.