Intelligent Automation Week: What It Is and Why Automation Teams Attend
If you work in automation, you’ve probably seen the phrase “Intelligent Automation Week” pop up in your feed, on vendor slides, or in a colleague’s out-of-office. It isn’t a product or a certification. It is a conference series — the flagship event brand of SSON’s Intelligent Automation portfolio — and for many enterprise automation leaders, it is the one week a year they leave the office to talk about bots, AI, and scaling what they have already built.
What Intelligent Automation Week Is
Intelligent Automation Week is organized by SSON, the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network, which runs conferences under the IQPC events group. The series sits alongside SSON’s other automation summits, but it has its own identity: it is aimed at practitioners building and scaling automation inside large organizations, rather than at vendors pitching software.
Editions have been held in several cities. The main U.S. edition has run in Dallas, Texas, with a June 24–26 program featuring a keynote program, pre-conference workshops, and an Innovation Hub. An earlier winter edition took place in New Orleans, drawing a speaker faculty of more than 75 cross-industry executives. There is also a themed offshoot, Intelligent Automation Week: Finance Transformation, which ran in Atlanta, Georgia, from November 12–14 with a finance-focused agenda.
What Happens During the Week
The format is consistent across editions. A workshop day opens the event, with hands-on sessions on topics such as identifying high-impact processes to automate, managing the transition from pilot to full implementation, and running generative AI proofs of concept. The two main conference days that follow mix keynotes, panel discussions, fireside chats, and interactive discussion groups (IDGs) — small, peer-led roundtables on current challenges like process mining, chatbots for finance operations, and citizen development.
A trade-show-style Innovation Hub hosts vendor demos and pavilions organized around topics like generative AI and business transformation, with use cases spanning pharmaceuticals, banking and financial services, retail, and consumer goods. Many attendees treat this as the event’s most useful part: it is where they benchmark their automation maturity against companies at similar or more advanced stages.
Who Attends and Why
The audience is made up of automation center-of-excellence leads, shared-services executives, IT operations managers, and digital-transformation sponsors. The content targets organizations moving from early adoption — running proofs of concept and pilots — toward scaled, governed automation programs, sometimes described as the “automation singularity”: a fully integrated human-digital workforce.
For readers who follow our automation coverage, the topics will feel familiar: scaling RPA beyond pilots is the core theme of our guide to automating IT operations, and the vendor-demo format is similar to what we covered in our piece on robotic process automation webinars. Intelligent Automation Week is essentially the in-person version of both.
The Practical Angle: Is It Worth Going?
Attending is an investment. Listings for the event show ticket prices ranging from around $1,499 to $3,999, before travel and hotels, and sessions are CPE-accredited (the Dallas edition offered 20 CPE credits; the finance edition offered 26), which helps justify the cost internally for finance and audit professionals.
Our take: Intelligent Automation Week makes the most sense if you are past the “what is RPA” stage and into the “how do we scale and govern it” stage. If you are still learning the fundamentals, a free webinar or an online guide will teach you more per dollar. If you already run an automation program and need to benchmark it, hire for it, or defend its budget to executives, the peer network is the real product — and that is what the price buys.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Intelligent Automation Week?
Intelligent Automation Week is a conference series organized by SSON (part of IQPC) focused on enterprise automation — robotic process automation, machine learning, cognitive technologies, and generative AI. It combines workshops, keynotes, peer roundtables, and vendor demos across editions in cities like Dallas, New Orleans, and Atlanta.
Who organizes Intelligent Automation Week?
It is organized by SSON, the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network, which is part of the IQPC events group. IQPC also runs related editions such as Intelligent Automation Week: Finance Transformation, which focuses specifically on finance operations.
How much do tickets cost?
Public event listings show ticket prices ranging from about $1,499 to $3,999 USD, depending on the edition and pass type. Registration typically includes lunches, refreshments, and conference materials, and IQPC’s policy is that payment is due in full at the time of registration.
What topics are covered at Intelligent Automation Week?
Agendas cover RPA, machine learning, cognitive technologies, generative AI proofs of concept, process mining, chatbots, citizen development, and scaling automation from pilots to enterprise-wide programs. Recent editions have added topic-focused pavilions on generative AI and business transformation.
Who should attend?
The event is designed for automation leaders, shared-services executives, IT operations managers, and digital-transformation sponsors who are scaling automation programs. It is most useful for practitioners past the beginner stage who want peer benchmarking, vendor evaluation, and CPE-accredited learning.
Sources
- Clocate — Intelligent Automation Week listing
- ASDEvents — Intelligent Automation Week: Finance Transformation
- EdgeVerve — Intelligent Automation Week New Orleans
- SSON — Intelligent Automation Week event guide (PDF)
