When I was actively involved as a researcher, it was a running joke (and also a truism) that scholarly distinction wasn’t earned through originality, but through the invention of new terms to describe old things. The same is most certainly true when it comes to industry jargon. And it’s especially difficult to keep up with terms used to describe the use of artificial intelligence to automate business processes.
The following is a list of common — and frequently confused — terms. This is an evolving field, and in some cases there is still no general consensus around terminology. If you feel a term is missing, or a definition is lacking, please leave a comment below.
Autonomous Enterprise
Sarah Burnett (2022) simply describes an autonomous enterprise as one in which most, if not all, high-volume, repetitive, and transactional business processes that make up core business functions are automated. According to Burnett, key characteristics of the Autonomous Enterprise include:
- Conducts core, daily business functions using AI, with minimum human touchpoints
- Employs people who are required to perform few repetitive tasks
- Empowers staff to automate repetitive tasks for themselves
- Uses operational data to create digital twins in order to identify inefficiencies and improve processes
- Analyses operational data to support strategic decisions, including risk management and innovation
Autonomous Operations
Most commonly, the term is used to refer to the operations of vehicles, heavy equipment and physical robots in ways that make use of webs to sensors and AI in order to automate things like transportation, manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and the like.
For the sake of clarity, I would recommend the term ‘Autonomous Business Operations’ to describe the use of AI to automate decisions, actions, and self-learning in the business process domain.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are blockchain-based organizations fed by a peer-to-peer (P2P) network of contributors. Their management is decentralized without top executive teams and built on automated rules encoded in smart contracts, and their governance works autonomously based on a combination of on-chain and off-chain mechanisms that support community decision-making.
Santana & Albareda (2022) Blockchain and the emergence of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): An integrative model and research agenda
Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation is not a thing or a specific set of technologies. Instead, it is an organizational mindset according to which everyone is automating everything that can be, all the time.
Intelligent Automation
While many definitions would tie the term Intelligent Automation explicitly to particular kinds of technology (i.e. as the combination of Business Process Management (BPM), Artificial intelligence (AI), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), I prefer the more common sense and technology-agnostic definition proposed Coombs, et al (2020): “the application of AI in ways that can learn, adapt, and improve over time to automate tasks that were formally undertaken by a human.”
Virtual Enterprise (VE)
A virtual enterprise (VE) is a temporary alliance of businesses that come together to share skills or core competencies and resources in order to better respond to business opportunities, and whose cooperation is supported by computer networks. (Wikipedia)
Timothy Harfield 