Dive Brief:

• Nearly four in five business technology workers are comfortable letting business users create their own automation, according to Workato's State of Business Technology Report. The company commissioned Atomik Research to survey 534 IT and business technology professionals.
• More than half of business technology professionals are frustrated by the speed at which they can deliver results to other lines of business, according to the report.
• Despite the gains in automation deployment, more than one-third of business technology workers say slow or no adoption of automation from their coworkers is a top challenge in their line of work. 

Dive Insight:

Automation's efficiency potential is tied to enterprise ownership: No matter how efficient an application can be, it could fail without ample adoption. 

Low-code platforms can provide an entry point for business users to automate certain tasks. Yet the majority of low-code users still sit in an IT context, with two out of every three citizen developers in IT positions, according to a report from Creatio.

When solving an enterprise problem with automation, the technical perspective "is just the beginning," according to Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, chief AI officer at eBay. 

"Actually getting adoption and integration is much harder," said Mekel-Bobrov

Within the business user subgroup, adoption isn't uniform. Employees from certain teams — including business analysts, business operations and customer success teams — were most likely to automate their own processes, according to the Workato report.

Part of the difficulty in achieving broad automation adoption has to do with resistance to change, and how difficult it is to get people to do their work differently, according to Mekel-Bobrov. 

"But also: It's a ton of coordination," he said. "There are so many teams that will typically touch a [workflow] that you have to coordinate with a large number of stakeholders, all of whom need to be on board and aligned."

For example, H&M's strategy to increase automation adoption was to create a library of reusable machine learning components, moving from a use-case-specific approach to a more democratic model where technology is made available throughout the organization.

The puzzle of AI adoption is broad, and few companies have managed to move the technology away from a silo.

Just one in five companies are in the "AI leaders" category, according to a report from Cognizant. The firm determined top performers in AI by gauging the importance of the technology for business processes as well as the number of areas in which it's deployed.