How Intelligent Automation Is Taking Shape

 

General understanding of Intelligent Automation is to use AI (Artificial Intelligence) for Business Process Automation. However the way we see, it Involves 2 aspects-

1. Intelligent Design of Business Process / Process Optimization– What we mean by Intelligent design here is to relook a given Business Process end to end in current shape and form and evaluate if it makes sense to Automate “As It Is” or it calls for refined process design even before automation. This step is critical to ensure one is not automating a problem rather than solving. In fact the majority of time the main reason behind failure of RPA is process design itself. There is great detailed article here on How to approach RPA Solution Design.
2. Use Of AI(Artificial Intelligence) along with RPA (Robotic Process Automation)- As we know that RPA is most suitable where process is not dependent on Human Intelligence but with Advancement in sophisticated technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning it makes a strong case for RPA BOTS to have Cognitive Abilities and take process specific decisions. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the most important component of intelligent automation. Businesses can establish a knowledge base and make predictions based on structured and unstructured data by utilizing machine learning and complicated algorithms to evaluate structured and unstructured data. In turn enabling RPA BOTS to take independent informed judgments.

Example of Intelligent Automation- Consider a scenario of a Back Office of an Investment Bank’s back office department which attends to client queries. A Client send an email to “Support Mailbox” asking for specific details around Portfolio Performance?

Typically this case would need a Client servicing team who would be monitoring mail box and once mail is arrived first level support team would team dig in to Data available to them and try to respond if they have answer depends on their access to transaction level data and expertise. In case person find there is no sufficient details query would be marked to Account department having finer details around transactions. Now think instead of a Human First Level Support team if an “Intelligent Bot” scanning the Mail Box for any Client Queries .. sounds interesting ?

Intelligent Automation Framework

A typical Intelligent Automation Framework would consist of 3 Layers

1. Enterprise Data Pool– The success of Intelligent Automation initiative largely depends upon the availability of Structured / Non Structured Data of the business from various sources; as this Data is used by Machine Learning models in order to develop judgment capabilities around the business process.
2. Machine Learning Models– These are the software algorithms used to train the AI.
3. AI Powered RPA (Intelligent BOTS) – RPA Tools with integrated Cognitive Capabilities like Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision etc.

Intelligent Automation Trends

Big companies with deep pockets have already started leveraging Big Data capabilities and using it for sophisticated machine learning models. However, Intelligent automation is still in its early stages. Except for a few one-off projects, it remains out of reach unless you are a large firm with a dedicated RPA budget to throw at interesting ideas.

Most of the RPA Technology providers saw this opportunity and moving towards-

• Cloud based BOT Farms or SaaS based solutions with basic Cognitive Abilities like Speech to Text, Optical Character Recognition i.e. Image to Text or Text to Speech, Image Recognition, etc. making it more feasible for even smaller firms to adopt Intelligent Automation.

Automation is essential for staying ahead of the curve in the realm of technology. Over the next year, businesses will try to uncover new ways that automation and machine learning might help them decrease costs and reinvent their existing operations. What it means is –

• Increased use of AI thus fueling Digital Transformation journey of businesses.

In almost all organizations be it small or big, staff uses 10s and 100s of different applications/software on a daily basis, ranging from MS Word, PowerPoint, MS Outlook to WhatsApp to Sugar CRM , Web ERP etc. We expect to see more firms adopting digital desktop assistants by 2022. In a recent Gartner survey, more than 80% of organizations said they’ll “continue or increase” automation spending in near future.