According to the 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Task Mining Tools report, “enterprises with many workers undertaking repetitive processes struggle to acquire the insights required to plan daily work better, reduce costs incrementally and optimize processes continuously.”
With the sheer quantity of tools that can be used for digital transformation, it can be hard to make sense of the market. Task mining is a relatively new technology that has gained momentum in the last few years, spawning startups and leading established players to develop a task mining offering. But what is it?
Gartner states that, “task mining is a technique to infer information from low-level event data available in UI logs from a desktop or a device. This information helps IT leaders identify automation opportunities, improve employee experience, increase workers’ productivity and justify AI use cases.” While traditional process analysis relies on manual methods that often miss the mark, task mining observes users to show exactly how a process is performed. Advanced task mining tools can generate accurate process maps that contain all variants in a process and highlight recommended areas for process re-engineering or automation.
Understand how work gets done with task mining
Task mining records and analyzes user actions on a desktop (such as checking emails or accessing spreadsheets), with the goal of helping organizations understand and improve their business processes.
Process intelligence is data that has been systematically collected to analyze individual steps within a business process or operational workflow. Process intelligence derived from task mining shows organizations how to optimize end-to-end workflows.
Together these give a granular view of processes, looking at what people actually do on their computers, then finding new ways to automate tasks, make work easier for employees, help them get more done, and make the case for AI.
How task mining works
A key feature of task mining is that data does not need to be in a specific format for the technology to work. In fact, existing data is not necessary at all since task mining collects data by observing employees conduct their work as usual. This means that there is essentially no barrier to entry when it comes to getting started with task mining. Additionally, advanced task mining tools require little to no manual effort on the part of the user to generate insights.
Task mining works by collecting data from the clicks and keystrokes that users perform. This is typically done by applying computer vision to screenshots, querying the operating system, or some combination of both. Task mining then uses machine learning to discover structure in the data it collects and generate insights. In as little as one week, task mining can deliver meaningful results.
Task mining drives process improvement standardization
Process Discovery: task mining identifies the processes that make up an organization. By looking for repetition in day-to-day work, task mining accurately predicts when a process is occurring and where it starts and stops.
Process Definition: task mining generates process maps that show exactly how a process is being performed; advanced tools can show all decision points and variations and provide detail down to the screenshot level. Anonymization techniques can be used to mitigate security concerns regarding PII and any other type of sensitive data.
Process Analysis: task mining uses machine learning to generate insights about worker tasks, including handle time, automatability, and overall process volume.
Applications for task mining outputs
In any type of process improvement, the first step is gaining a thorough understanding of the as-is state. No technology is better for this than task mining.
Intelligent Automation: the number one application of task mining is scaling enterprise intelligent automation like AI, RPA, IDP (Intelligent Document Processing), or OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Three key automation challenges that task mining helps with are discovery, speed, and quality.
- Discovery: automation teams struggle to identify the right opportunities and prioritize them based on impact and effort; task mining solves this by automatically identifying automation opportunities and calculating key metrics that help with prioritization
- Speed: mapping processes is a highly manual process and development lead times are long due to inaccurate, incomplete, or hard to use requirements documents; task mining solves this by generating process maps in as little as 1 week
- Quality: processes aren’t as automatable as initially thought or only “happy path” processes are developed, leading to failed automations; task mining shows exactly how a process is performed, including all variants
Analytics and Optimization: task mining guides optimization efforts by calculating machine learning assisted metrics and identifying steps in a process that are ripe for improvement.
- Analytics: average handle time, handle time distribution, time spent per application, structured data percentage, variance, and many other metrics can be calculated using task mining.
- Improvement identification: task mining can identify the non-standardized parts of a process and process bottlenecks, helping teams quickly identify where there are opportunities for process standardization or improvement.
Where to start with task mining
The beauty of task mining is that it can be used any time people are doing work on a computer, but it’s industry and function agnostic. Organizations looking to benefit from task mining may start with one of the common examples below:
- Finance and accounting processes like accounts payable and report creation
- HR processes like onboarding and payroll
- Operations processes like supplier onboarding and back office processing
- IT processes like helpdesk management
- Customer service processes like call center operations and responding to customer enquiries
Get data-driven results in just one week
One of the key benefits of task mining is that it does not require extensive internal resources to deploy. With advanced task mining tools like Mimica, virtually no manual work is required by the user to generate insights. For this reason, task mining is much easier and quicker to deploy than similar technologies like process mining that often require entire teams of highly trained specialists to realize value.
Where you start with task mining depends on what your specific priorities are. Whether you need to identify new automation or optimization opportunities, map a known process, or gain insight into a lesser known area of the business, task mining can help. Tools like Mimica that enable improved and automated processes lead to lower costs, more engaged employees, and happier customers.
See how Mimica can help you transform your processes — request a demo today.
This article was updated on April 3, 2025
