Trillions of dollars are lost on nonproductive work — $7 trillion to be exact — representing vast opportunity for automation and digitalization.

“It’s a massive opportunity,” said Salah Khawaja, managing director of automation and global risk for Bank of America, at the recent AI Business Week Symposium. Khawaja quoted the $7 trillion lost in his presentation, noting, “A lot of the work that knowledge workers do is going to get automated through traditional automation mechanisms and AI. This tide is going to rise, and we can all participate in it.”

Khawaja cautioned at the beginning of his virtual presentation that all opinions were his, not those of Bank of America, but his presentation offered insight into how the head of automation at the $2.8 trillion bank considers automation products. He outlined seven rules for building a great product, starting with the most important: Have a purpose. For instance, Google’s stated purpose is to organize the world’s information, he said.

“You’ve got to rally people behind that purpose, whether it’s yourself, your team, your stakeholders, and identifying a simple purpose is very important,” Khawaja said.

At Bank of America, the work is considered intelligent automation, with an end goal of eliminating manual, lower-level tasks, Khawaja said. “We want to basically kill the manual processing so we can free up our people to focus on the more insightful work,” he added.

Khawaja’s second rule is to embed design into a new product. Design is critical to success, he said, and any size company can design for automation, thanks to low code/no code solutions. Specifically, consider what part AI can play in product design, he said. The third rule is to think about software and algorithms, and what role they will play in the new product.

Data and interfaces

The fourth rule relates to data and the interfaces that support automation and ease of use. “Data is like uranium, right? Where if used wisely, it’s very powerful. And if not used wisely, it’s not,” Khawaja said.

Interfaces are also key. As an example, YouTube’s initial success hinged on its ability to be embedded in blogs, Khawaja said. “How are you going to interface into other products, or other products interface into you?” Interfaces can solve problems that might otherwise prove onerous, and he pointed to the example of an API that makes video interface possible. “You can interface into it and you could actually get a video service up and running,” Khawaja said.

For Bank of America, this means taking a platform approach to automation, with dashboards, workflow, alerts and search built into the platform. In doing so, the automation team considers the role of a worker who obtains information, analyzes it, then reaches a conclusion, Khawaja said.

“What we’ve done is, we’ve built a platform that replaces the getting of information, replaces the analysis and information, and then replaces how the information is displayed,” Khawaja said. “We don’t think of automation as this one siloed thing; there’s many, many aspects to the ecosystem.”

Think growth

Khawaja’s fifth rule of product creation is to plan for growth, which he said must be built into the product. The sixth rule is to focus on the people — not just employees and diverse customers, but those who contribute to the product.

“You have to really, really rely on other people to come up with ideas and try it. Don’t say ‘no,’ say ‘yes.’ Let people hack their way through it,” Khawaja said. “If it works, great. If it doesn’t work, you know what, who cares? You’ve learned some lessons.”

Finally, banks should think of the long game when planning an automation product, Khawaja advised. Consider what Bank of America’s CEO and Chairman Brian Moynihan did with Bank of America, he said. “It took him the better part of half a decade, coming out of the 2008 crisis, to stabilize Bank of America,” he said. Banks should think about what any new product is going to do in year two and year three, he said.

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.