As many countries face another wave of COVID-19 cases, organizations around the world are planning new ways to keep their workforces safe. Leading companies have made huge strides in managing coronavirus while keeping their workplaces open. But despite how far we’ve come, many employees still doubt that their organizations are ready to respond to COVID-19.

Automation was already well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous investment in 2020, then the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated interest and adoption. Organizations started deploying Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), and other automation capabilities en masse, which interacted with mission-critical systems, legacy applications, and workers in both the front and back office.

Even before COVID-19 became the biggest challenge to operational resilience in a generation, organizations were struggling with a gap between digital transformation and internal processes that felt decidedly “pre-digital.” Automation presents a solution, connecting new tools to old, legacy systems through three key shifts in technology.

Suddenly there’s a crisis. What do you do? Many organizations responded to the COVID-19 crisis by quickly automating with digitally-distanced work processes such as telemedicine, digital learning, working from home and the like. But few were positioned to do it well. So says best-selling author George Westerman in his essay: Digital Transformation Isn’t Really a Technology Challenge.