CIOs are under tremendous pressure to reduce costs, both within their own IT departments and by directly supporting other business lines. Capgemini Research reports that 56% of business leaders expect to prioritize cost reduction over revenue growth for this fiscal year.
Even though CIOs are feeling pressured to cut costs, 50% of organizations report that they will continue to increase strategic investments. Agentic process automation (APA) is one powerful investment that can achieve multiple goals for CIOs by driving massive ROI, cutting costs, improving operational efficiency, and increasing productivity. In fact, intelligent automation technologies—which APA falls under—are expected to reduce costs by 22%, while also increasing revenue by 11% in the three years after implementation.
While legacy automation solutions including business process management (BPM) and robotic process automation (RPA) delivered some tangible benefits to CIOs, their untenable maintenance costs and low agility in support of enterprise scale ultimately limited both adoption and impact. In opposition, APA can quickly unlock benefits for CIOs through a combination of natural language processing, generative AI, and built-in skills.
| Problem Area | Benefit of Agentic Process Automation |
| Mounting Manual Labor Costs | Directly reduces labor costs by automating routine manual tasks of varying complexity |
| Operational Inefficiencies | Improves efficiency, resulting in reduced work hours and lower labor costs |
| Increasing Cybersecurity Costs | Bridge talent and skills gaps and drive down cyber risk with AI automation |
| Mounting Technical Debt | Consolidate point solutions and drastically reduce maintenance costs of legacy systems |
Reduce Manual Labor Costs
APA significantly reduces costs associated with manual labor. Examples include data entry, customer service, invoice processing, inventory management, and other repetitive tasks. Take financial services, for example: loan application processing tasks such as document verification and credit score assessment can be quickly automated, so loan officers can focus their efforts on more complex cases and building stronger customer relationships. McKinsey estimates that tasks comprising up to 30% of working hours could be completely automated, translating to trillions of dollars in savings.
APA is far more adaptable and intelligent than previous technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which operate within rigid frameworks and require significant development work when processes change. Contrarily, APA is capable of learning and adjusting automations in real-time with minimal human intervention. This adaptability enables complex workflows at enterprise scale, without sacrificing performance or efficiency, making it an ideal solution for businesses looking to scale their operations without proportionally increasing their workforce.
Improvement in Operational Efficiency
Bain’s Automation Scorecard 2024 Report reports that the top quartile of organizations prioritizing automation investments were able to cut costs by an average of 37%. On the other hand, organizations investing 5% or less of their IT budgets in automation could only manage to cut costs by 8%.
APA has the potential to be even more impactful than legacy automation solutions like RPA that require substantial upfront investment, specialized developers, and significant maintenance. Kognitos uses pre-trained models that operate in plain English, enabling multiple business users to automate processes and reducing IT bottlenecks while preserving oversight.
Not only are tasks being automated, but implementation and maintenance headaches are significantly reduced, empowering employees to work as efficiently as possible and pushing agility in the organization.
Enhanced Cybersecurity at a Lower Cost
Cybersecurity is a significant cost center for CIOs, and is expected to remain so in the face of increasing cyber threats and more sophisticated data breaches. In 2024, the average cost of a data breach climbed by 10% to $4.88M.
In addition to infrastructure, pervasive cyber skills gaps and talent shortages further drive up the costs associated with cybersecurity. Attracting and retaining cyber talent is expensive, and demand far outweighs supply, making cybersecurity a top cost center for CIOs.
APA solutions help bridge skills gaps by making more efficient use of cybersecurity personnel. Rather than spending time continuously monitoring networks for potential breaches or isolating malicious traffic, team members can deploy AI agents capable of autonomously addressing issues that arise. Organizations can cut costs and improve cybersecurity without adding headcount.
Technical Debt Reduction
79% of tech leaders cite technical debt as a significant hurdle in achieving their business objectives. So much so that they dispatch anywhere from 25%-40% of their developers’ time to addressing tech debt.
CIOs have struggled to replace point solutions and retire legacy systems without business disruption. The emergence of APA provides an opportunity to consolidate point solutions and cut costs for both the system itself, as well as its maintenance costs.
APA has the potential to be even more impactful than legacy automation solutions like RPA that require significant upfront investment, specialized developers, and substantial maintenance. Agentic platforms can streamline workflows of similar or greater complexity, incorporating previous point solutions into a single end-to-end platform and further accelerating cost savings.
Driving Change
Agentic automation solutions provide CIOs with the opportunity to do what previously seemed impossible—reducing costs while optimizing resources to drive AI innovation in the organization. As leaders and business executives, CIOs must drive strategic change across key focus areas to deliver substantial cost savings.
AI automation will be crucial for CIOs to grow their strategic influence and drive their organizations forward. If you are a forward-leaning leader looking to prioritize strategic automation investments at your organization, reach out to the Kognitos team to see how we can help position you for greater success.
