A McKinsey report found that only 1% of company leaders consider their organizations to be "mature" when it comes to deploying artificial intelligence (AI)—meaning they have fully integrated AI into their workflows and are seeing substantial results.
This isn't for lack of trying. For years, executives have understood the role that workflow automation plays in increasing productivity. The current struggle, however, is how to fit AI into their existing automation strategy in a way that actually makes a difference, rather than just creating another silo.
The common pitfall is wasting time and effort on one-off AI models or isolated automation projects that fail to connect and deliver end-to-end process efficiency. This is where the strategy stalls. What’s missing is the "conductor" for this increasingly complex orchestra. This is the role of business process orchestration.
Orchestration is the management layer that coordinates all the moving parts: your human and digital workers, your disparate systems, your data, and—crucially—your AI tools. It’s the framework that allows you to regain control and move from isolated projects to having an organization with mature AI.
In this post, we’ll explore the critical distinction between orchestration vs. automation and how they must work together to build an end-to-end process automation strategy that finally delivers on the promise of AI.
Orchestration vs. automation
Business process orchestration is a management approach that connects your workflows, technology, and people. Using a visual, low-code interface, process orchestration allows you to quickly build and manage complex processes. Think of it as the overarching framework that helps you facilitate the handoff between digital workers, human workers, data, and systems.
Workflow automation refers to shifting responsibility for tasks from humans to technology better suited to handle repetitive, time-consuming work. It’s the tactical execution of single tasks by virtual machines.
Orchestration and automation play separate, related roles
Orchestration and automation are both essential components of optimizing business processes. Automation is all about streamlining repetitive and manual tasks within a business process by using digital technologies like:
Artificial intelligence (AI)
Integrations for tools like ERP systems
Business rules
Automation tends to be the first thing businesses look at when evaluating ways to improve processes. This is because the promises of automation are vast: decreased human error, fewer repetitive tasks for employees, built-in audit trails, and massive cost savings—but that’s only if you get it right.
And getting automation right isn’t as easy as just applying it to a workflow and hoping for the best. That’s where orchestration comes in. By unifying data and systems across your business, orchestration tools provide you with a way to manage larger workflows and more complex processes, giving you the oversight you need to apply automations where they will have the most impact.
Combine them for better end-to-end processes
Let’s go back to our PB&J analogy. If process orchestration is the jelly (helping you manage workflows, people, and machines) and automation is the peanut butter (the execution of tasks by machine workers), then combining them into a unified process orchestration and automation platform that combine is the bread that brings the sandwich (your business processes) together.
Combining automation with orchestration helps you optimize business processes from end to end, enabling you to:
- Connect data with tools like data fabric that unify information across systems and apps.
- Simplify workflow design with visual proces models that you can build like you would a flow chart.
- Automate your workflows by orchestrating people, technologies, and data in an end-to-end process.
- Improve process performance with the ability to track and analyze key performance indicators and inefficiencies.
- Deliver superior experiences to all of your users, including employees, partners, and customers, with better, faster processes.
Uniting humans, bots, and systems improves speed and agility so you can boost operational efficiency, adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands, and innovate.
Orchestration in action: Real-world examples
The principles of orchestration, automation, and AI are powerful on their own, but their true business value is unleashed when they are woven together. The easiest way to understand this impact is to see it in action.
The following real-world examples show how a unified process orchestration and automation platform helps organizations move beyond isolated projects. Instead, they are solving complex, end-to-end challenges, dramatically speeding up operations, and creating frictionless experiences for their customers and employees.
Insurance: Faster document review
Problem: Canada Life, an insurance provider, needed a better way for underwriters to review life insurance applications, which were taking weeks to process. Lengthy documents were taking hours to review contributing to a 25-day turnaround.
Solution: By using AI agents, Canada Life is able to extract key data and information from those documents for underwriters to review with 98% accuracy. They can also query a records chat agent about the content of the documents in both English and French. Now document review happens 75% faster.
Banking: Improved customer onboarding
Problem: A bank in Latin America wanted to improve their customer onboarding process so they could more easily scale their business. While the clients were able to access their new accounts in a few hours, the paperwork internally took two weeks to complete.
Solution: With Appian, the bank orchestrated onboarding workflows like KYC verification and risk evaluation and enhanced them with AI to reduce the time it takes to complete internal paperwork. Now most onboarding happens in less than a minute unless the account is flagged for exception processing. False positive flags have also been reduced and regulatory compliance has become easier.
The goal of orchestration and automation
The ultimate goal of orchestration and automation goes beyond cost savings and process efficiency. These tools provide you with a way to transform how your business operates, free your employees to do higher value work, and provide better customer service. With a process orchestration and automation platform, you can extend the life of your legacy software applications and augment them with newer technologies—like AI—making modernization faster and easier while reducing risk.
