INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: A Key To Increasing Margin

Want to widen your margins on service delivery? "Intelligent automation" can help get you there, Gartner believes.

Through 2021, service providers that use intelligent automation will lower their cost of delivering commodity services by 15 to 25 percent annually, the research firm predicts.

"We are shifting from labor arbitrage to technology arbitrage," Tramacere said, with the latter offering a "major" opportunity for service providers.

Most intelligent automation that Gartner sees is at the level of IT task automation, which are the most routine and least risky tasks a service provider can tackle, Tramacere added. The bigger payoffs for margin come with the higher-level functions, such as automating and orchestrating business processes, he said.

Automation is a "critical investment area for you as a provider," Tramacere said, and an "incredibly important and powerful chapter in the IT services revolution."

However, he warned, it's not necessarily a silver bullet.