By now, B2B and B2C businesses are well-aware of the potential of AI in adding value to their organizations, from being able to grow insight to grow better physical and administrative processes. Artificial intelligence isn’t quite the powerful force that sci-fi movies predicted, but it is absolutely growing more influential to the day to day lives of people and businesses.
One way that AI is enhancing organizations is with robotic process automation or RPA. Your Story defines RPA as, “virtual agents, which automate, improve and/or assist human activities. Robotics can either operate in compliance with a set of predefined instructions or autonomously. The technology is increasingly affordable and user-friendly for businesses today. Day by day; Robotic Process Automation (RPA) companies have increased their productivity and performance in order to become a fast-growing organization. Automation is important in every business as it extends its support from assembly lines to customer query handling”, with the RPA benefits including greater efficiency, better quality and repeatability of certain actions, human talent freed up for higher-value tasks or avoidance of labor shortages.
When artificial intelligence merges with RPA, businesses can create more intelligent automation that can benefit your business. Silver Touch, an RPA provider, notes, “When AI is integrated into Robotic Process Automation solutions, it brings the capability of gathering and sharing useful information with different systems and makes better decisions. Customized RPA solution can utilize information fetched by AI and performs the complex task with ease. Summing up, AI, together with cognitive technologies and ML (Machine Learning), empowers robotic process automation by introducing a human response in the workflow.”
The biggest ways AI will affect robotic process automation
According to the software engineering company Daffodil, “AI empowers RPA with its cognitive capabilities including machine learning and speech recognition. These cognitive technologies help in automating emotional or judgment-based processes, which is not possible with RPA alone.” How does this impact your business processes?
- AI has the ability to extra data from semi-structured, structured, and unstructured data sources. AI can be trained to deal with all the variations of data at a large scale and to a very high degree of detail recognition. If reviewing invoices, for instance, AI can find additional data even if its written in a different format or a different place than where the data should be for instance, AI can help RPA invoice review accurately calculate if value-added tax has or hasn’t been deducted from an invoice when reviewing edited invoices or multiple formats from multiple vendors.
- AI has self-learning capabilities, such as natural language processing and speech recognition. How does this combine with RPA to improve your business? Daffodil gives the following example: “If an email has been written complaining about the delivered product’s quality and did not even mention an order number. AI will be able to detect that it is a complaint regarding the product’s quality and will also fetch order number from the information it already has.” This can go a long way in helping you not just offer more enhanced customer service and rectify order issues faster, it can alert production and development teams about potential issues, staving off future problems.
- AI also adds value to RPA by using its judgment to look at complex data from a number of sources, including voice, text, natural language, and more. This means that AI can be used with RPA to better assess problems, use predictive analytics, and forecast future trends. Instead of RPA simply running a set of predetermined tasks, artificial intelligence integration makes it easier to find out different applications of robotic process automation and where it can and should be applied throughout the business. Ultimately, the fusing of the two will lead to not just process completion, but process analysis and improvement. Daffodil notes, “The help of natural language processing, machine learning, and speech/face recognition. RPA can be advanced to make predictions, detect patterns, models and associated events. It will definitely go beyond just process automation.”
When businesses are always looking to get an edge, offer a better experience to customers, clients, and employees, or ultimately create a more successful operation, many of them turn to technology to help bridge the gaps in process or identify and reduce inefficiencies. The investment in the robotic process automation technology for businesses might be significant, but it can also produce significant results. Deloitte research notes that “RPA continues to meet and exceed expectations across multiple dimensions including improved compliance (92%), improved quality/accuracy (90%), improved productivity (86%) and cost reduction (59%).” With business benefits like these, the adoption of RPA will likely continue to be adopted by and positively impact businesses like agriculture, logistics and transportation, security, retail, and construction. The synergy between AI and robotic process automation will help continue to drive down costs and increase business efficiency.
