We define touchless operations as the combination of intelligent insights, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), and automated orchestration supported by an end-to-end automation architecture, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, standards, and frameworks.

To get there, we are implementing ways to deploy highly intuitive solutions, use machine learning to predict events and recommend next-best actions, build mature self-learning, and enable self-healing capabilities that minimize human interactions. To develop the assets, we created rapid touchless automation development cells that include automation architects, machine learning developers, data scientists, DevSecOps specialists, and others.

Shifting to standardized frameworks
Our Touchless Operations teams are motivating individual application teams to use standardized, enterprise-level automation and orchestration frameworks. These are frameworks that can plug and play an application/business-specific automation. These secure and scalable frameworks orchestrate between various Accenture enterprise platforms and tools, resolving issues without human intervention.

Building on top of the Accenture IT technology stack
The teams are creating tools and touchless operations assets on top of the Accenture IT technology stack, allowing automated rollouts at scale, while ensuring seamless maintainability and security and the ability to customize organization-wide.

We built an ecosystem over the state-of-the-art Accenture enterprise architecture touchless automation platform that supports cognitive and applied intelligence. Reusing the foundational building blocks enabled necessary connectedness and real-time speed. Our touchless automation assets benefited from the reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability that were established.

Our teams then built self-service-enabled intelligent assets, intelligent bots, and cognitive chat bots with machine predictions and deployed intelligently orchestrated actions. We also enabled an agile, plug-and-play living ecosystem with platforms and frameworks.

Deploying solutions
The newly established self-healing and auto-resolving assets involve analysis of millions of tickets, monitoring alerts, service requests and provide recommendations and machine-enabled solutions. These solutions are helping to advance our touchless operations journey while improving speed, accuracy, and keeping our businesses and operations running.

Touchless Automation Orchestrator (TAO). The Touchless Automation Orchestrator (TAO) proactively prevents system failures and outages. It eliminates manual effort to address service tickets for disk space, server issues, application pools, critical services, databases issues, and server reboots. All identified applications were onboarded to TAO. The platform provides a 360-degree view of all remediation activities and auto-provisions into new applications as they are brought in.

Intelligent Application Security Platform (IASP). Our security team automated vulnerability scans and fixes as part of the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline to make Accenture more secure.

An example is the Intelligent Application Security Platform, one of the program’s largest initiatives. The platform performs comprehensive application security scanning that includes millions of lines of source code covering approximately 55% of internal applications to identify and fix security vulnerabilities. Once an application is scanned, the platform generates options on remediations and also reduces false positive detection. In addition, an automated dependency bot, working with evergreen application templates, fixes vulnerabilities it detects caused from using code libraries with outdated versions. These templates automate standardization, manage upgrades and enable compliance that makes applications secure from the start.

Machine Learning (ML) assets. Several teams are building machine learning assets to offer machine-suggested, predictions, solutions, and fixes. One example is ML technology-based solutions to address incidents from Accenture’s Time and Expense application, where resolving incidents before the end of each cycle is critical. Incidents are manually tedious to resolve, leading to inconsistencies and high resolution times. Now, several AI-enabled automation solutions prescribe appropriate resolution steps for issue-specific scenarios addressing 60% of the incidents for this key application.

Predict and Prevent is an AI-based asset to forecast and prevent outages. It intelligently analyzes the historic patterns generated from different monitoring sources. The asset captures the complex relationships and inter-component dependencies with unusual patterns and short- and long-term trends to forecast outages at granular level. The “prevent” part is invoked after successful predictions and enables auto-prevention of these outages via several remediation flows.