New Delhi, May 10 (IANS): The Covid-19 pandemic has brought automation technologies to the forefront and the Intelligent Automation (IA) market in India is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55 per cent, with large enterprises expected to spend nearly $40–350 million in IA capabilities in 2024, a new report said on Monday.

The overall expenditure is expected to exceed this figure since the market now also includes start-ups and various SMEs.

IA combines the capabilities of robotic process automation (RPA) with smart optical character recognition (OCR), conversational AI and cognitive intelligence.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about unprecedented changes in how organisations function. It is the need of the hour for organisations across the world to re-engineer the ways of doing business," according to the report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and PwC released at the ‘Digital Transformation Summit'.

"Organisations need to transform themselves into modern workplaces that enable the synergy between their human and machine workforce, with the former assuming responsibilities for strategic and customer-centric initiatives and the latter

executing repetitive activities," the findings showed.

IA is helping businesses to deal with the crisis and find ways to move forward as more organisations shift towards digital.

"Organisational priorities have shifted, and more organisations have started adopting digital tools and technologies. This initially helped support basic business operations and is now allowing them to emerge with more robust digitally empowered operating models," said the report.

In 2020, 94.7 per cent of Indian organisations fast-tracked some level of digital transformation programmes. Further, 92.3 per cent are reinventing their business models.

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to increase economic growth exponentially over the next few decades. Sixty-four per cent of Indian organisations expect to increase demand for cloud computing as a result of Covid-19 alone," the report mentioned.