Name: Scaling Smarter: What 700+ IT leaders taught us about intelligent automation
Uploaded: 2025-12-10T18:46:15.796Z
Duration: 33 min 16 s
Description: Scaling Smarter: What 700+ IT leaders taught us about intelligent automation

Transcript for "Scaling Smarter: What 700+ IT leaders taught us about intelligent automation": Hey, everyone, and welcome to our webinar, sailing smarter. My name is Kim Lockett, and I'm joined here, with me by Scott Buswell. So I run product marketing here at Seligo. Been in the industry for many, many years. Scott, joined us recently as chief customer officer, and Scott comes with a ton of industry expertise, especially, dealing with customers and implementing projects, for customers as well as supporting our customers on a daily basis. So super excited to have Scott joining us. Before we dive in, super quick housekeeping. We are recording the session. It will be sent out to everybody who registered, within, by tomorrow. There are there is a q and a, but we do wanna make this interactive. There's a lot of stats we're about to show you. So, if you've got any questions, please throw them in the q and a. We have additional resources for you that can be found in the docs tab. And last but not least, you know, please, please make this as interactive as possible. We've got thirty minutes to share with you today, and we'd love to get to to know some of you online. Next is, we are offering a quick end of year, incentive to come talk to us about what you guys are doing, what challenges you might face be facing, what opportunities you have ahead of you. So we would, we'll give you a $50 gift card if you book a demo, before the thirty first. We have somebody online who can help you, do that. There's a button right up at the top you see request demo, and then we have somebody online that will help you do that to get your $50 gift card. That said, some of you may not know who we are, so we wanna acknowledge that. And just, no advertising here. Just a quick level set of who Zilligo is and what we do. So Zilligo is an intelligent automation platform. We basically help you unify all of the ways that you could possibly do integration and automation in a single platform and a single user experience. So we support everything from, application cloud integration, data integration, b two b integration, application, sorry, API managements, and AI agents. So everything from your your deterministic rule based, integrations all the way through to AI in the same user experience. So no bolt on tools, no different, UIs to sign on to all under one single UX, which allows you to see everything that's happening. So whether it's a b two b flow or an API management flow, you have full visibility over everything that's happening, from an integration perspective, and that really gives you the the ability to scale and see, what not only IT is doing, but other business units within your organization. We've recently been recognized as, Gartner customer choice, for integration platform as a service, and we have been the g two leader for integration platform as a service for the last two years. So that ends, the Sligo pitch. Let's get into into the data. So level setting here, on what your what the state is based off of. So we we conducted, annual surveys to our customers over the course of the last three years. So what we've done is we've taken that data, that cumulative data, and we've analyzed it across the three years to see what kind of trends we're seeing and how people are are approaching automation, the challenges that they're they're dealing with, and how they're looking at it towards the towards the future. So with that all said, in a blitzkrieg, style, we're gonna get right into, the data. So first one is, when we looked at what was the driver behind automating, What we saw in the 2025 survey started to show a a market change in how people are thinking about automation. So in the responses, more than more than four x, responded that they are automating for scale versus automating to reduce costs. And I can tell you that in previous responses, that that spread was not as great. So there's definitely a shift that's happening as, first question, I think, you know, for Scott, we're gonna, we're gonna pepper you with a question here, Scott. So, Thanks for that. Thanks, Kim. yep. Here comes the pepper. So, I mean, there's, you know, there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of dry like, push to automate. Right? And, you know, and but we are seeing the shifts. So so do you think that, you know, leadership I think I I think most of the people that are in the trenches know the pain, but this whole thing around operational efficiency being critical. I mean, do you have to sort of be a little bit more deliberate about how you approach this, this problem? Or, you know, you know, tell tell me a little bit more about that. Like, how what are you hearing in the in the field around this? Yeah. I think I think the I I think we all need to become a little bit more deliberate. I think that in the past, we've kinda said, look. You know, we just wanna operate we we wanna create efficiencies in the business, but with the uncertainty of the economy, you know, the new competitors that are entering the business landscape on a on what seems like a daily basis. Right? You know, the traditional linear model or equation for growth has been, you know, add more headcount, then there then that drives more revenue for you. But that's really starting to break now. You know, we have the disruptive forces of the cloud and automation and now AI that's really disrupting all that, and it's really opening up a new opportunity for us all to think differently think differently about how we work, how we're consumers, how we do our work jobs, to and, you know, and really start to achieve, what we've all been talking about, like, for the last twenty plus years. Right? And with and it's really with these convergence of these forces that execs are really talking about opening up new revenue streams to grow really at the top line and to create this nonlinear growth that we've all been that we that that we've been seeking. And and in order to do that, we have to have goals and objectives. You know? We have to be tying our, the work that we're doing, on a day to day basis and creating more efficiencies back to a more strategic company objective. And in order to do that, we have to be much more deliberate in that. Yeah. That that makes sense. Tying the goals of automation back to, like, an OKR or a corporate goal is is a way to, you know, get these projects funded, in a more scalable way. And and it so if I what I'm hearing you correctly is, like, it sounds like, the shift is is sort of happening maybe in in IT IT leadership, and they're looking at things but less worried about well, I'm sure they're still worried about budget, but they're less worried about budget and more worried about, like, am I gonna hit a, like, a capacity ceiling about my ability to deliver what the business needs? You know, are you hearing more about that as a concern that sort of and maybe it's not IT specifically, but whoever is building out these automations that they're they're worried about capacity. Oh, yeah. This this this message and this challenge is there not only in IT, but also in the business. You know? So anyone delivering these sorts of automations, are out there. And it's really only been exacerbated in the last, you know, couple years as we see, you know, business and IT more and more aligned on the overall strategic objectives of the company. You know, this IT delivery gap that we've been talking about for so long is now there not only in IT, but it's also there in business. Right? Because we're all trying to, you know, deliver more and more and help to automate these various processes. So, you know you know, this is where IT can provide a platform, and and security and governance and visibility that enables the business to leverage those, you know, those core assets, to leverage that core platform, to build and operate, intelligent automation by by the business. You know, we have a customer, Devil Mountain Nursery, who recently, they're an ERP centric company, who is a who's a wholesale nursery with facilities in both Northern And Southern California. And they've they've gone through a great transformation, and they've been able to, automate a lot of their, wholesale business, being able to deliver product, directly through their to landscapers. And now they're able to, you know, reuse much of what they had built for their wholesale business and create a new business to consumer line, not in months, but really in weeks by leveraging a lot of that same a lot of the same assets that they've they've already built for the whole for the wholesale business and be able to do that much more effectively and faster. Yeah. So what I'm hearing from you is the there's clearly intense. There's clearly desire. But when they look at their current infrastructure, maybe that's where they're starting to hit some some bottlenecks. So let's talk about this next, this next set of stats around, like, what is what is stopping that forward progress? And what we what we saw was a couple of things that stood out. So the first one is manual processes. So manual processes are you know, you're using spreadsheets. Somebody's rekeying data. You've, you maybe you're doing a CSV upload manually. You know, name your pick your poison on that one. And the what was interesting here was you you would think with all of the tools out there and all of the ways you can do this that that manual processes as a blocker to achieving this this scale desire would actually go down. In reality, the data shows that it's actually going up. So from the 2023 survey to the 2025 survey, it increased about 9%, which was a little, surprising. So as I said, you know, Scott, like, with all of the different options out there, why do you why do you think that's happening? Well, I think that the that as you talked about, you know, the traditional methods have been CSV and, you know, tab limited files, you know, just moving Excel, around, you know, manually and using what we normally call, like, swivel chair integration is and and the traditional methods have been, you know, using that, and now we've been trying to offshore more and more of that, off to India and South America and and stuff like that. But but now it's come to a point where there's just so much need for for innovation. There's so much need for intelligent automation that that we had to take a step back. You know? And customers are taking a step back and and saying, you know, how can we do this? How can we do this and be able to provide a better customer experience, to it? And how can we be improving data quality, around this? So there's a couple of customers that we've that we've been working with. Adecco is one of them. And they've been spending three FTEs, about a hundred hours a week to do manual reconciliation of their orders. That's a lot of time. That's a lot of effort, and they're doing and so what what we did was that we went in there. We understood what the business process was. We understood why why the manual reconciliation, was happening across the different of splitting orders and allocating funds, etcetera. And we went in, and we were able to automate this. And automating this increased the throughput by 40%, using the same number of people that we're now focused on able to do more revenue generating types of activities. So, you're starting to see how we're automating and be able to take those same resources and those same people to actually grow more revenue and provide a better experience than that. It's really exciting to see all this happening. Yeah. No. That's that's awesome. So on the other side is this resource inefficiency. So this is sort of the yin and the yang of this problem. Right? So the 29% of resource efficiency, this is just people doing busy work, you know, where like you said, Scott. Right? They they've thrown a body at at the problem. So there's a there's a secondary stat here that you'll that you'll see in the the automation report, itself, which we'll give you link to in a minute, about the impact on employee retention, and employee satisfaction. So there's there's a connection between all of this and how satisfied your employees are with the work that they're doing and then and, therefore, how well you can retain them. So look for that, link in the in the report itself. But, you know, sort of going back to, you know, this core problem, right, around, like, how do we how do we break the manual process, problem? I mean, it clearly, if it's growing, you know, a new approach is needed. Right? So, and it feels like it's almost like a mind shift, that needs to happen. Right? Like, approaching a problem, needs to be done differently, which means we need to sort of shift our thinking about how we solve the problem. Is that kind of what you're seeing in in, you know, from the leaders that you're talking to that they've gone through. this? I think you sort of alluded it in your in your first response that, there is this shift in thinking about how to approach the problem. Maybe talk about. that a little, bit more. efficient growth isn't just a top down initiative. Right? It's also needed to do a bottoms up focus as well, right, because because we need to be making the we need to be making efficiencies in our business, and we need to be getting buy in from everyone around us. Right? So we've been working with the with the number of customers, to help them out in the change management of this. Right? So how can we get the first line how can we get, the first line leaders how get them more and more engaged so they start to having ownership? So we have both top down as well as bottoms up initiative, and and ownership in that. So so, so we work work with a number of different customers, to, go in, work with their first line leaders to better understand what are the strategic initiatives, within the company, and then helping them helping the first line leaders have a say, you know, and create ownership on how to implement those things. And we use I mean, there's a number of different frameworks out there. There's Rice. There's Moscow. There's a number of other, areas to help identify what are the right sort of processes that we wanna go in that we wanna go operationalize, and and and automate so we can provide, better experiences both for our customers as well as for for the employees as well. And, I think we're seeing some great, outcomes from that. Awesome. So the next, the next slide is about, the value. Like, once they've, had this mind shift, they've approached the problem differently, you know, where where are they actually seeing value? And one thing that stood out here, in the 2025 survey results versus the other the previous two years is that data quality has taken over as the number one realized value from automation. Traditionally, it had been, the second one, reducing operational costs. We're also seeing if you combine this, the third and the fourth one, those are all about scale. So this is where we're starting to see, this this shift in thinking about, like, what does automation really give me? And it's not just about solving a a very specific problem or fixing a specific issue. It's about the fact that my data needs to be better, and I need to be able to set up for scale. So I thought that that was an interesting shift, and let's, you know, maybe double click into that a little bit. So so, Scott, do you I mean, this feels like a maturing of of the of the market. Would you. would you. agree with that? Totally agree. This has actually been something that I've been talking about most of my career and talking about how how how do we provide better customer experiences, across the entire customer journey. And, and I'm really excited that we're now able to start to see this. Right? So so the lack for years, there's been a lack of data integrity that's been the source of corporate scandals with massive financial penalties, catastrophic, you know, reputation damage, etcetera, like that. And and now, those same pains are actually not not so much, you know, legal impacts, but now, like like, businesses are starting to say, wow. You know, if I were able to have better data integrity, if I were able to, you know, provide a single view of the customer, if I were able to, better, you know, handle my customer support cases and be able to provide a better customer experience and improve, you know, NPS and CSAT, if I were able to, you know, acquire more more and more, you know, leads and do that in a more, scalable manner, That's the vision. Right? That's the excitement. That's the ability for us to, like, truly engage in a new way with our customers and use automation to do that in a much more scalable way. Awesome. Yeah. So, maybe this might be a little bit of a softball question for you, but, like, you know, and it wouldn't be a webinar if we didn't mention the word AI. So here we go. So on that data quality thing, you know, just this this tipping point on 2025, I mean, it do you think there's an a AI effect, at, at large. here? Right. That's a total leading question. Yeah. Yeah. Really, you know, data is really at the heart of everything that we do now and how and how we make decisions. Right? A good example, that we've been working with a couple of marketing organizations on are really how to, modernize their whole MarTech stack, really, and and bringing together their CRM, their map, their ERP, their data warehouse, and their analytics systems, you know, to provide, you know, a single view of the customer and be able to engage in the customer in a single way, regardless of what channel they they engage with us, whether they're anonymous or whether they're, you know, known, etcetera. And it's really cool to see how we're able to, you know, bring all this together, by by creating a single view of the customer. It's really helping them, use AI, to engage customers with, like, virtual agents and, you know, and handling, inbound leads, to book a meeting. It's really helping them really truly transform their business and really make a step change, in how they're looking at their customer and, you know, in growing revenue. Awesome. So maybe you can, bring us home on this section and just kind of sum it all up for us around, Sure. the strategic. takeaway, here. really, by operate by operating leverage, it's doing significant more significantly more than just, throwing people at it. What the data tells us is that companies aren't just automating to eliminate people. They're really automating to implement change, right, and automating because their current teams are drowning in manual work, and this is slowing them down in their ability to scale, and grow. So here's what the bulk of our customers, do, is that is that they automate their manual processes. They're they're eliminating, more team they're they're they're eliminating a lot of the manual processes so they can use their teams to grow, and do more revenue generating work. And a great example of this is really Therabody. Right? You know? Therabody, is a health and health and wellness and fitness company. I don't know. I use some of their products, to help, like, alleviate some of my tight muscles. My wife uses it for, you know, light therapy, as well. So we all, you know, stay younger and all that stuff like that. Right? And they're and they're an ERP centric organization, and they and they were constrained by order processing bottlenecks and errors that required a lot of, you you know, manual intervention and adding, head count during during seasonal spikes. And what and and what we did was that was that we took really a crawl walk run crawl walk run approach with them. And we got in. We established the right foundation, making sure that that we were able to automate their existing processes and reduce as many errors as we could so they could so they could free up, you know, resources to do other things. And then and then as part of the walk, we're able to help them, you know, add additional, you know, marketplaces through Shopify and eBay and others and help grow their overall top line revenue. So they're really getting getting the best of both worlds, and and this is a great example, of of a customer that's that's been part of our Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you know, campaign that we've been working on. And that's where and that's where the platform really stood up well. Zero like, 100% uptime where Zilligo, the IO platform, was able or processed over 8,200,000 orders, peaking at over two or 2,000,000 orders per day over that two, four day period. So a great, you know, success story. Maybe you've seen some of the Slack or some of the LinkedIn posts, but, you know, the platform is doing more and more. 66% year over year increase on that. Awesome. So, you know, I think we're starting to see people, you know, adopt automation in a in a different way. But and there's obviously, a new frontier ahead of us, which is, is AI. The good news is is that what we see in some of the data, specifically, like, the data quality stuff, is the shift. And I think there's a survey launching. Is that true? Yep. Okay. There we go. So if there's a survey that we're gonna launch here, if you just curious, you know, if you're looking at AI, what are some of the barriers that you're you're running into? And, just take 15 here to answer. Okay. Let's see. Alright. So, it looks like we'll give a few more seconds here, but it looks like people are it's very similar to what we've seen in other polls. We've run this, similar poll, a few times. So data quality and access are typically number one with a bullet and then, you know, the the types of resources. So what we can tell you is what the data also shows is that what you're doing now on your automation side. So as you're thinking about how do I improve my data quality, how do I automate more of my processes to get better accuracy out of my my actual business processes themselves that are automating my order to cash, my reconciliation, my subscription management flows, that all of that work is actually setting you up really, really well for AI because the first thing it needs is clean data. The next. thing it needs is clean processes. So the work you're doing now to automate is going to serve you well in the future as you approach AI, and your AI workflow, initiatives. And we're gonna have more on this in a webinar in January. So, I'll talk about that, more in a minute. So, leaving you with this parting message around, if you're thinking about AI, you're trying to figure out how to get on to the AI bandwagon, and you feel a little, stuck because you don't have good data and you don't have access to that data, think about solving an automation problem that leads to getting you the data that you need to solve an AI problem or bring AI into a workflow. And that could be a good place for you to start. And with that, I'm gonna hand it back over to my compadre, Scott, to, kinda sum it all. up for us. We're kind of in the home stretch here. So over over to you, Scott. Sure. So if you have any questions, please feel free to submit those questions. We're gonna have a little bit of time, to take questions from you. But, you know, the five lessons learned that we've learned from our customers is that number one, it's it's really thinking about long term scale and the end to end process. Right? Not just thinking about these things from a short term fixed perspective. You know, think about the long term experience and what and what the strategy is that you're trying to deliver, you know, for your customer. Number two is that is that it's really a new delivery model. It's really business and IT really coming together. It's IT providing the the platform and the governance, and really enabling the business to be creating their own automations and flows, to make their business to make the business much more efficient. Now thirdly, it's about this new operational reliability with this new working model leads to more and more growth, within within the organization, and to do that in a more automated way. And by doing all this in an automated fashion, you can and by improving your data quality, you can then turn on AI and leverage AI in a much more cleaner way. You're gonna be set up for AI, just by, you know, thinking in this general manner, and then, it'll lead to greater outcomes. So lots and lots of fun, in doing this. So, I think we're all kinda going through this. You know, we're going through this, here at Saligo, and I'm sure that you're going through it as well. So it's about, like, sharing the stories and better understanding and, you know, collaborating and and and leveraging the best practices that we've shared today. Awesome. Thank you, Scott. And as promised, so we only showed you a little bit of the data that is available in our benchmark report. You can access it here, by scanning this, QR code. There'll also be a link in the follow-up email that you'll get tomorrow with this reporting. Again, lots more data that, and a lot more sort of customer stories are in that report. So I I encourage you to to download it. And as I promised, we've got another webinar that's gonna be, hosted by our CEO, Jan, in January. We're we're gonna go through the six automation challenges that will shape 2026. A little hint here, AI will be one of them, and we'll show you how you can solve for the AI problem, and the automation problem, together, and how they're actually pretty symbiotic, in their relationship. So with that, we're gonna open it up to questions. We got a couple minutes here. And let me read the question here. So we have, one question. So we this is pretty common for our customers where or people that are kind of looking to see to move on to what's next. Like, you already have something. Right? You're doing something. You've got a legacy tool. Maybe you got many legacy tools. You're doing some custom coding, etcetera, etcetera. So the the question is, you know, how do you how do you pitch this to your leadership that you that getting an automation strategy and, therefore, an automation platform is actually a growth, investment rather than just kind of an IT cost. So, Scott, maybe in a in a minute or two, you can can answer that one. Sure. Okay. I'll go quick. So yeah. So as Kim said, this this is a really common problem that many of our customers face and we're dealing with, and we're helping them through that along on this journey. So what there's there's a couple of things that we focus on. Number one is really understanding what the what the business's strategic objectives are, across your organization and then focusing on what are gonna be those growth letter growth levers, how are you gonna grow, and then talking through, like, what's the plan. Right? So it's easy to go ahead, you know, and say, we we wanna grow x or we wanna create this sort of efficiency, but it's hard to really have a plan on how to get there. Right? And it's through that planning exercise that you start to realize, oh, I might have some bottlenecks, right, within within my current processes or within my current business, that would actually impede us from getting there. Those are the areas that we really wanna go and focus on. Those those are gonna be the biggest benefit, and it's gonna be where those growth plans and those and those and those current bottlenecks really, really collide, which is where Soligo really becomes the platform of choice, you know, for many for many of our customers. So, as we have initial successes, you know, and we build that trust, with our customers, we can then fuel the growth of your company, and making sure, that that that you're getting maximum value out of our platform and that you're growing revenue per plan. Awesome. Well, that is all the time we have, today. I really appreciate everybody joining. I hope you found it useful information. Again, more in the in the reports. And thank you for your time, and have a great rest of your day. Alright. Happy holidays, everyone.