The CoE Survival Trap

Over the past decade, enterprise organizations have rushed to establish Centres of Excellence for Intelligent Automation. The promise was clear: centralized expertise, delivery excellence, cost optimization, and measurable business value.

We've seen CoEs structured in countless ways, some centralizing technical capabilities while partnering with business stakeholders on strategy, others taking full ownership of the automation pipeline from identification to deployment. The specific operating model matters less than the fundamental purpose: delivering automation that drives real business outcomes. Yet there's a trap that catches most CoEs.

Seven years ago, when automation was new and exciting, early adopters across business functions rush to partner with the CoE. Innovation labs want to pilot cutting-edge use cases. Operations teams see automation as the solution to their pain points. Finance departments calculate potential savings. The pipeline fills organically with genuine business-driven opportunities.

But novelty fades. The early adopters have implemented their obvious wins. The next wave of stakeholders is more skeptical, more cautious. They've seen the demos, heard the promises, and now they want proof before committing their time and resources.

The CoE, now a cost center with headcount to justify, faces an uncomfortable reality, they need to prove their worth through automation volume. This is where the trap springs.

Instead of working alongside business functions to identify the highest-value automation opportunities, the CoE starts to drift, shaping an automation strategy in isolation. They rush at finding cases to justify their existence, not with solving the business problems that matter most.

The partnership fades, and the CoE grabs more and more responsibility to ensure pipeline flow. Success becomes measured by number of robots deployed rather than value delivered. The CoE starts hunting for anything that can be automated, forgetting that some things shouldn't be automated.

Survival mode is not pretty (and often expensive):

Process Selection shifts from "What creates the most business value?" to "What can we automate quickly to show progress?"

Stakeholder Engagement becomes a sales pitch rather than a partnership. CoE teams start showing up to department meetings with pre-built solutions looking for problems to solve, instead of listening for genuine pain points that warrant automation.

The reporting becomes a parade of vanity numbers. "We deployed 47 bots this year" sounds impressive until someone asks the uncomfortable questions: Did anyone get reassigned to higher-value work? What's the maintenance cost of keeping 47 bots running?

And we can go on. But enough negativity. Let's end on a positive note.

One of the unexpected gifts of the AI revolution is that it's bending time for CoEs in ways we couldn't have imagined a decade ago. Tasks that used to consume weeks happen in hours. This acceleration creates something CoEs have rarely had: capacity to think strategically instead of just execute tactically.

The failure of many CoEs to be true partners wasn't usually about lack of intent, t was about lack of time. When you're drowning in implementation backlogs and technical debt, strategic partnership feels like a luxury you can't afford. AI changes that equation fundamentally.

With this newfound capacity, the most successful CoEs are already evolving beyond their original mandate. They're incorporating design thinking expertise to spend real time understanding business problems before jumping to automation solutions. They're shifting mindset from seeing automation purely as cost reduction to recognizing it as a way to untap revenue opportunities that require creative thinking and deep business understanding.

The CoEs that survive the next decade won't be the ones that deployed the most bots. They'll be the ones that used AI to become better business partners, not just better automators.

Not all Intelligent Automation CoEs will pivot to this next phase, but perhaps the trap was temporary for some.