Accenture rolls out Accenture MyWizard , an intelligent automation platform consisting virtual agents to assist human tech workers

Ever since I started working in IT industry or more specifically in testing role the buzzword has always been 'automation', Quality engineers would have heard this word zillions of times in their career and it seems to be the only solution to reduce your cycle time, increase productivity and efficiency. In 6 plus years of my experience I have worked with 3 companies and 7 managers across different projects, domains , technology but they all seems to have a common understanding of improving testing efficiency by automation. The term has a very broad meaning and it took me a good amount of time just to understand the capabilities and limitations of the same and lot can be written about it, however we will stick to the agenda of this article and discuss the latest development on this front which comes from pioneer IT firm Accenture.

Accenture just announced roll out of its AI backed intelligent automation platform which not only handle parts of Test Engineer's job but also assist project managers in resourcing, agile development methodologies and helps take better informed decisions with the help of data science and analytics.  Accenture myWizard, that enables smarter, more innovative and more efficient application services consisting of systems integration and application development and management. The platform combines Accenture’s industry and technology assets and business knowledge across 40 industries with intelligent automation, including artificial intelligence at its core.

Accenture myWizard employs virtual data scientists to help human workers
manage projects through better use of analytics

"Organizations can use Accenture myWizard to become up to approx. 60 percent more productive by automating task-related work and enabling them to focus on more strategic work."

The platform is build by bringing numerous Accenture proprietary industry assets, intelligent analytics tools and methods, as well as tools from across Accenture's alliance partner ecosystem. As you might have already guessed, the platform mines data from Accenture's vast cumulative knowledge base of different industries across verticals, process flows and key performance indicators. MyWizard is hosted on Microsoft Azure and its plug and play architecture is said to be 'tomorrow-proof' with the abilities to add further capabilities as the Artificial Intelligence knowledge base matures over the time.

Accenture myWizard has a number of virtual agents that use machine learning to collaborate with human co-workers to manage projects, apply analytics to support business goals, advise on a range of judgement based tasks and monitor numerous aspects of Agile development.

• Intelligent Data Scientist: This scientist helps identify data patterns and mines program information to provide IT and business users with the ability to make more insight-based decisions.

• Virtual Testing Savant: This agent provides advice to human testers on a wide-range of judgement-based tasks, such as test planning, test coverage, prioritization and even staffing. It provides test artifacts for reuse and solutions based on past fixes, helping testers spend less time preparing and fixing and more time fine-tuning applications to improve business performance.

• Virtual Scrum Master: This agent monitors numerous aspects of Agile development projects consisting of requirements, releases, metrics and resources – alerting the project manager of any potential issues and providing possible solutions.

Over the past six months Accenture myWizard has been deployed to more than 100 clients globally. Accenture is training approximately 3,000 professionals in Accenture myWizard and plans to deploy the intelligent automation platform to more than 200 clients by the end of August 2016.

The automation world has stepped into another dimension for me with  this announcement, however how many organizations adopt for this platform and continue to work with same will be actual testimony of the efficiency promised by Accenture.