From Automation to Autonomy: Charting the Future of AI

AI moves fast. However, staying ahead of AI innovation is only part of the challenge. Leaders must know the next steps—and the ultimate destination—to achieve enterprise goals. The move from simple automation to an AI-infused autonomous enterprise will be transformative, but where should leaders focus their efforts today?

We’ve developed a structured framework to guide you on this journey. If you’re aiming to thrive in an increasingly automated future, read on to understand AI’s accelerated advancements and how our maturity model aligns your organization with what’s next, whatever that may be.

From RPA to APA: The industry is moving on

Ever since digital technologies entered the workplace, developers have added automation capabilities that have increased worker productivity. An early “killer application,” VisiCalc, released in 1979, automated mathematical calculations and freed humans from the slow drudgery of tedious analog calculations, ushering in a new era of digitally driven automation.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and automation quickly evolved from simple screen scraping to transferring data between incompatible systems to complex workflow automation that transitioned paper-based processes into the digital realm. As technology advanced and the cloud became mainstream, dedicated platforms emerged to automate repetitive tasks and even complete entire workflows. Thus, RPA was born.

But, where RPA established an automation foundation, it was limited to relatively simple tasks. Complexity, decision-making, interpretation, and other higher-level aspects of business processes were beyond RPA’s capabilities. Need to monitor a support email inbox for incoming customer issues? RPA can handle that. Want to understand the nuance of the issue, determine which support agent is best to handle it, and craft a customized reply? That’s beyond RPA’s typical capabilities.

Agentic process automation (APA) represents the next leap in enterprise automation, enabling AI agents to complete complex tasks autonomously and without human intervention. Generative AI lets APA adapt to changing conditions, work around unexpected scenarios, and craft responses, summaries, and other content with appropriate context and articulation. APA also adds collaboration capabilities—across AI agents and between human workers and AI—that redefine work in terms of goal attainment instead of task completion.

Organizations are now demanding this advanced, AI-driven APA that infuses context, collaboration, and autonomy to orchestrate outcomes rather than automate tasks. This is a key step toward becoming an autonomous enterprise, but the journey is easier when utilizing a structured framework for infusing business operations with AI.

The CI-CMM: A maturity model for what’s next

AI is a rapidly evolving concept that both amplifies its potential impact and leverages speed as a distinct advantage. But, a recent Accenture survey found that 65% of executives report a lack of technological expertise necessary for AI-driven transformation. Without the proper knowledge, executives can’t bring AI into the organization effectively and quickly.

A key challenge facing enterprise executives is understanding where their organization currently stands in terms of AI and automation skills, adoption, scalability, and progress, and, more importantly, where to focus next. Sustainable transformation isn’t easy or fast, but it does follow a logical path built on experiences and best practices.

The Capability Maturity Model for Collaborative Intelligence (CI-CMM) offers a structured framework for integrating AI and automation into enterprise processes, enabling the pursuit of goals and outcomes while mitigating risks. This model guides teams in implementing effective AI aligned with strategic business objectives, demonstrating how leaders can embed AI into complex processes, move teams and entire organizations through maturity stages, nurture organizational trust and transparency, and ultimately become an autonomous enterprise.

The CI-CMM provides executives with a five-stage roadmap to evolve from today’s basic human-led AI interactions to fully autonomous operations where AI and humans collaborate seamlessly. It also offers organizations a means for benchmarking progress, identifying gaps, and targeting resources and investments.

Pressing toward the edge of AGI

As mentioned, AI is a fast-moving concept. More recently, the focus has shifted to the potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a future AI technology that will mimic human capabilities to understand, learn, think, and make decisions. But even as the race to AGI is predicted to take years, if not decades, innovators are quickly closing that gap.

At our annual customer and partner event, Imagine 2025, we announced the industry-first Process Reasoning Engine (PRE), an intelligent AI engine that understands enterprise context and dynamically drives work to achieve outcomes. PRE leaps beyond traditional automation and general-purpose LLMs to let our AI agents plan, act, learn, and improve as they execute complex enterprise processes.

PRE and other Automation Anywhere innovations are a significant step toward AGI for the enterprise, where AI agents understand goals, interpret context, and act independently alongside humans. The results show a 3x increase in efficiency when building end-to-end automation and 60% greater automation resiliency, well beyond that of standalone LLMs or traditional automation.

Reaching this point requires AI maturity, which the CI-CMM defines and maps progress toward specific goals. Most organizations are already using AI. The CI-CMM puts you on a trajectory to use new AI innovations as they become available. We’re building that future today with pre-trained, domain-aware AI agents, PRE that adds enterprise context and understanding, and agentic orchestration across people, systems, and tasks—all at enterprise scale.

Today’s AI imperative: Move your organization up the maturity model quickly

McKinsey estimates that 92% of companies will increase AI investments over the next three years and that just 1% believe they’ve reached AI maturity.

Enterprise leaders now face the pressure to advance AI maturity against the reality of operational complexity. The CI-CMM framework provides guidance, helps distribute resources, and outlines achievable goals. Enterprises are then enabled to leverage technologies that don’t simply automate tasks and reduce costs; they allow automations to think as AI tackles complex, end-to-end enterprise processes.

At Automation Anywhere, we’re delivering innovations like APA and PRE and providing the experience-driven framework of CI-CMM to help leaders turn AI and AGI from buzzwords into tangible and measurable impacts. Similar to the advancement from RPA to APA, CI-CMM enables enterprises to transition from isolated pilots and disconnected platforms to autonomous, coordinated work, thereby elevating collaboration between humans and AI to enhance decision-making and innovation.

Autonomy and collaboration: The next phase of work is here

Autonomy doesn’t mean isolation; it means independent action within a shared, intelligent system where AI and humans collaborate. Researchers at Accenture found that deploying AI to displace human workers returns short-term productivity gains, while using AI to augment humans provides the most significant and scalable impact.

APA empowers enterprises with both automation and collaboration. The collaboration emerges as AI agents employ human-in-the-loop decision-making, agents collaborate with other agents through orchestration to accomplish complex goals, and enterprise systems pull crucial context from information to make decisions and trigger other processes.

Automation Anywhere provides the innovations to augment human effort and scale worker impact, while CI-CMM puts organizations on the right path.

Want a clear roadmap to the future of AI in the enterprise? Download the CI-CMM white paper to explore the five stages from basic AI interactions to fully autonomous operations, determine where your organization stands, and set your course for maturing into an autonomous enterprise.