Can IA enhance the current RPA offerings across industry verticals?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is about improving process quality, speed, and productivity of industrial and business processes. This is increasingly important in the current market as organizations seek to enhance their digital transformation offerings. The term was introduced to the market in 2012 via a case study written by HFS and supported by Blue Prism, which promised to remove manual workarounds and headcount overload from inefficient business processes and BPO services.

The traditional RPA tools offer precision and agility, attributes which humans lack. Such features make it a suitable fit for repetitive activities and back-end processes while delivering significant output in a shorter turnaround time. Sadly, studies have shown that deploying RPA platforms for automating repetitive tasks is not enough.  While they can mimic manual actions, they lack cognitive intelligence, which is the need of the hour. Further, it can only automate simple tasks. It needs instructions to carry out the processing of even structured data. Hence to addresses the gap, we now have intelligent automation (IA)!

Intelligent automation is a business-driven integration of Artificial Intelligence (including natural language processing, machine learning, and machine vision) and automation (RPA). This is interesting as it merges two diverse technologies: AI is knowledge-based, data-driven, and cognitive, while RPA is action-oriented. With intelligent automation, AI simplifies the decision-making, and RPA automates the manual next steps within the process. This also enables it to process unstructured data, handle exceptions, and continuously learn from operations. Thus, IA is able to automate more tasks in an enhanced manner than RPA. It also improves employee engagement by reducing time managing and re-training RPA bots. This means that IA leads to higher employee satisfaction. IA-based operations allow a superior degree of scalability and flexibility at marginal costs than conventions methods.

Though RPA wasn't data-hungry, IA is. Thanks to its features like scalability, ease of interoperability, it helps eliminate the burden of integrating disparate applications. Once the latter is resolved, its AI aspect can collect data and run predictive analytics to make data-driven decisions and carry further data analysis as per business requirements. According to KPMG, intelligent automation aims to mitigate the 'value leakage' that organizations currently face in their front/middle/back office functions due to disparate systems, data complexity, highly manual and error-prone tasks, non-standard processes. For instance, powered by intelligent automation, IBM Watson can analyze massive amounts of textual information to respond quickly to complex inquiries, such as requesting a medical treatment plan. Further, once companies include AI capabilities in the existing RPA pipeline, it can help improve internal processes. IA also allows looping in chatbots for conversational messaging in websites and apps. It has also helped many organizations opt for a virtual workforce amid COVID.

IA also augments IT automation. For instance, if an applicant misses entering data while filling the e-forms, the IT system will reject the form and flag it for human agents to rectify the issue. However, IA will identify the issue and self-correct the issue without any human intervention. In customer-oriented industries like retail, IA can help in offering improved customer experience and on-demand delivery by delivering what customers want and when they want it. Moreover, it can assess and mitigate a multitude of risk factors, like cyber threats, privacy breaches, product liability, and even claims of discrimination, which could be leveled at poorly trained robotic recruiting agents.

Today, while intelligent automation is enhancing RPA offerings, it is still in an embryonic stage. However, it is rapidly developing and has matured to the point where it has penetrated nearly every sector of the economy. Thanks to IA, we have automated cars, cobots, smart cities, and even home-friendly automated robotic vacuum cleaner nowadays.