Published on the 21/11/2025 | Written by Heather Wright
Why automation isn’t just about fixing pain points…
“Often it’s not the shiny, super crazy automation opportunities that you will be seeking – it’s really about starting small,” Priscila Bernardes says.
While AI is grabbing all the headlines, Bernardes, CEO of IT services company Lancom, says business process automation (BPA) is a quiet growth market, delivering measurable improvements in routine processes for businesses across Australia and New Zealand.
“The opportunity to do automation doesn’t always come from a place of pain. It comes from getting curious about day-to-day processes.”
Bernardes says businesses often overlook inefficiencies in routine tasks, with most businesses still dealing with repetitive administration, multiple spreadsheets and people being the glue connecting manual processes.
Those processes, however, rarely attract attention because they function adequately. However, they consume time and resources unnecessarily and are prime candidates for BPA.
“BPA is very much about creating efficiency, creating time and giving time back for people to focus on bigger and better things,” she says.
Case in point is a finance team which manually entered invoices into two systems every month.
“There was nothing wrong with the process. Nobody was screaming to say it didn’t work, that it wasn’t efficient or that it wasn’t something they could do.”
After implementing BPA, invoices were routed from the email into the accounting system coded to the right general ledger code. The change saved around 30 hours a month.
Such improvements often emerge during crucial process reviews where questions uncover repetitive tasks that can be automated.
“The opportunity to do automation doesn’t always come from a place of pain. It really comes from getting a little bit curious about day-to-day processes,” she says.
She cites other examples of BPA’s ‘simple’ uses, including automations for onboarding new staff, which include progressive milestones for the three month trial period, booking reviews along the way, or automations to collect all the new arrivals details, and trigger workflows to provision email accounts and IT hardware, send welcome emails and ensure they know where to go on day one.
“A lot of that is about how do we reduce the manual data entry or something that normally someone is tracking manually or that’s in their head – which is the worst case.”
Exposing data is also a growth area, she says. “Businesses are really looking for the ability to bring those data points to surface so a lot of our work, especially in the last six to 12 months, has been around combining data sets and surfacing that in the form of interactive dashboards that allow people to see insights and make decisions.”
Requests for access or resources can be routed through automated approval chains, improving compliance and reducing delays she adds.
Automation can also be used to create middleware solutions, for example automating conversion of supplier catalogues into ERP stock items, eliminating manual data entry.
The SME potential
Future Market Insights projects BPA will grow from US$17.1 billion this year to US$52.2 billion by 2035, registering a compound annual growth rate of 11.8 percent over the forecast period.
That growth, according to Future Market Insights, is driven by a quest for efficiency, reduced operational costs, and improved compliance by integrating digital workflows, artificial intelligence and robotic process automation.
Notably, SMEs are forecast to lead adoption with a 47.6 percent share of the market.
Bernardes is adamant the technology is very accessible for SMEs across the local market.
“The technology is so accessible now that any business of any size can dip their toes into this. It is very much a small business friendly area.”
License costs sit at around $20-30/month, she adds.
But she cautions not to boil the ocean but to pick one area of the business and one example, with high impact potential – whether through return on investment or creating space or ‘mental capacity’ for staff – to focus on.
Two key candidates: Finance and HR. “They are often quite process intensive and largely a lot more manual in how they operate.”
Solutions can be spun up in days or, in the case of more complex solutions, weeks rather than months or years, given many of the solutions delivered via BPA comes from low-code/no-code platforms.
“It doesn’t take months to experiment. It doesn’t take a year-long project to bring something to life.”
She says the biggest myth around BPA is that it is hard.
“People associate the word automation with complication. And needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to automate something. But that’s exactly the opposite. The way the technology has evolved has made it possible for almost anybody to tap into this area.
“All it takes is the right mindset to get started.”
Bernardes notes however, that many businesses struggle with pinpointing the processes which will deliver the most value when automated.
“The biggest challenge I see is being really purposeful about the use cases that they are going to be investing in. It’s not so much about the technology, the implementation. It’s the process mapping. It’s understanding where the opportunity is for you and your organisation to do more with less.”
Figuring out a starting point, when people are settled in the way things are already being done, is often where people struggle, she says.
Change management also requires careful consideration particularly with concerns around BPA replacing jobs.
“BPA is not there to solve performance issues or replace people. It’s there to augment people and empower them to bring their best selves to whatever they’re trying to do.”
She warns its crucial to ensure you bring the business along on the journey, ensuring they test the solution against the problem and their expectations.
“Often you say ‘let’s automate this process’ and everybody’s brain has a different picture so having that prototype come together and demonstrating it to the customer really allows you to have a good conversation about how it is resonating. Then you can move into the final solution design and implementation.
“There’s nothing worse than having this beautiful house that nobody wants to live in.”
BPA + AI
While it might feel like AI is garnering the glory and leaving BPA in the shade, Bernardes says in reality they work hand-in-hand. While AI dazzles with predictive smarts, BPA sets the stage by streamlining processes, so together they can create a well-choreographed performance.
Lancom is putting the partnership into action in an internal project, currently being piloted. The company has built a data lake that aggregates information from ticketing systems, CRM platforms and other sources. BPA automates the ingestion and structuring of the data and serves it in a number of different reports in PowerBI.
AI provides a conversational layer, allowing staff to query insights using natural language. A salesperson use natural language to ask what a customer’s top five queries were in the last quarter, for example, and receive instant answers.
“It’s a great example of BPA – we’ve done all the work around the data automation, the reporting using our BPA processes in our solutions – now we’re augmenting it with AI to bring the intelligence around data analysis through human natural language.”
Next up is prescriptive analysis.
“BPA is awesome at looking at current processes but if you overlaid it with AI we can start looking at how we can predict what could be happening in the future based on the trends we’re seeing.”
Retailers could trigger purchase orders based on trends based not just on the past but looking ahead, she says.
“The key in this space is really just having a starting point. The opportunities are everywhere, in almost every process. It’s about being able to see them and then choosing the right way forward.”
