Technology
Attended automation
A set of truly attended automation can increase productivity by 20%, and is an virtual assistant is working with the agents, making them more efficient and effective.
New kid on the block?
For those who started with ‘RPA’ or Unattended Automation, let’s start with this: No it is not new. Attended has been there for years, many will even say it predates Unattended Automation. Pega (after acquiring OpenSpan) and NICE (after acquiring eGlue) started the game with it and have been going strong so far with attended. One of the things which sometimes get challenged by other vendors is what attended sometimes is.
Looking at the attended which has been there for years, it is an automation, sometimes with guidance, working WITH the agent or user, not for the user. Attended in its pure form is not an agent watching a Unattended automation run on their screen, that should have been a hybrid automation where attended passes on the work to a robot.
Others say attended is a webform for an agent to fill in, our view is that this is merely an input for a robot, a way to give work to a robot, still there is no automation or guidance on the desktop of the agent.
Robots and building cars?
Looking at the automotive industry, which to date is one of the most automated industries on earth, they did not start by adding full automation. A car doesn’t just get built by a robot. Administrative processes can often be more complex and less standardized compared to other processes in manufacturing. While automation in manufacturing has taken decades, many organizations expect their administrative processes to be immediately automated E2E.
As interim step, we believe, Assisted Automation is where robots support humans rather than replacing them.
