GCP – Reclaim time and talent with AppSheet Automation

Digital transformation has been an enterprise priority for years, butrecent Google Cloud research reinforces that the mandate is more pressing today than ever, with most companies increasing their technology investments over the last year.  While there are many dependencies shaping the future of work, the challenge is to leverage technology to support shifting work cultures. Automation is the rallying point for this goal. 

According to research firm Forrester, “Automation has been a major force reshaping work since long before the pandemic; now, it’s taking on a new urgency in the context of business risk and resiliency…  As we emerge from the crisis, firms will look to automation as a way to mitigate the risks that future crises pose to the supply and productivity of human workers.”¹

Last fall, we announced early access for AppSheet Automation, a significant addition to AppSheet, our no-code development platform, that leverages Google AI to make it easier to automate business processes. Today, as part of our mission to further support the future of work, we are making AppSheet Automation generally available (GA). AppSheet Automation empowers even those without coding skills to reshape their own work with powerful new features including smarter extraction of structured data from documents and compatibility with a wider range of data sources like Google Workspace Sheets and Drive.

AppSheet Automation eliminates busywork

By making it easier to automate business processes, AppSheet Automation helps enterprises reduce IT backlogs and save money, while addressing possibly the most pervasive talent headache of all: busywork associated with manual tasks. A recent survey of AppSheet Automation early adopters found that 64% of those leveraging AppSheet Automation were able to focus on high-impact work rather than manual tasks. By harnessing the power of automation, talent can reclaim lost time while providing more space for high impact work. 

Manually entering receipt data or tracking down paper copies is time consuming, for example. But with AppSheet Automation’s Intelligent Document Processing feature, these tasks no longer need to be inefficient. Unstructured data such as invoices, receipts, and W-9s can be automatically extracted from documents, all thanks to Google Cloud’s Document AI. Process automations such as these help organizations to reclaim time and talent spent on repetitive tasks, empowering a company’s talent to spend more time on strategic and impactful work.

Growing adoption of AppSheet Automation 

Enterprise customers from around the world in a variety of industries are already using Google Cloud’s no-code application development platform, AppSheet, to empower their employees to build powerful business applications. Globe Telecom, a leading full-service telecommunications company in the Philippines, has built more than 50 business apps, within 8 weeks, with AppSheet, for example. 

“We’ve always been on the lookout for grassroots innovations among our employees at Globe. It is something that we’re very keen on cultivating for our people. AppSheet gave us this flexibility – the perfect tool to mine these innovative minds. It allows us to quickly execute and transform how business is done and improve how we serve our customers,” said Carlo Malana, Chief Information Officer at Globe. 

Similarly EBSCO, one of the largest privately held, family-owned companies in the United States, has been working to discover how the union of no-code app development and smarter automation capabilities can increase workforce efficiency. They have been using AppSheet Automation for tasks ranging from auto-ingesting W9s during employee onboarding to eliminating process gaps. 

“AppSheet Automation lays the groundwork for many automation projects to come, which will increase the speed of deployment, as well as provide better insight into automation processes, as the build process forces you to visually lay it out,” said Matthew Brown, IT Architect at EBSCO.

Improving workforce collaboration with AppSheet Automation

With this GA announcement, we are extending AppSheet Automation’s data source eventing support beyond Salesforce to also include Google Workspace Sheets and Drive, which will make collaboration even easier while keeping IT governance and security top of mind.

Looking ahead, we’re also building the ability to embed rich AppSheet views in Gmail to perform approvals on the go. This will allow users to perform process approvals without having to leave their current interface and helps save time.

As automation extends the power of no-code, organizations around the globe will find new and creative ways to engage with their workforce. Technologies such as AppSheet empower the people working within today’s highly distracted business landscape, helping them to spend more time on the work that matters and to do things they couldn’t do before. We believe this human-centric approach, which balances the needs of line-of-business workers with required IT governance and security, is important to supporting enterprises to become both more empathetic and efficient, and we’re thrilled to see how you use AppSheet’s new automation features. 

Ready to join the conversation? Start building for free and join our AppSheet Creator Community to engage with Creators from around the world. 

^{1. Forrester Research, The COVID-19 Crisis Will Accelerate Enterprise Automation Plans, May 5, 2020}