We’re going to tread very carefully in this blog for two reasons.
Firstly, we don’t like buzzwords very much but sometimes they are a handy way of grabbing attention to talk about interesting topics.
Secondly, we don’t want you to think RPA is going anywhere – but we want to give you an idea of the future. RPA and (in the future) AI are fantastic technologies that we want to help you seek out and bring into your business.
That said, RPA, in its current form, is not the future
Bot Extinction
We don’t want to undermine all our hard work or make you think it isn’t valuable. RPA right now offers businesses a great way of reducing repetitive work, saving money, and improving quality. However, the pace of technological improvement means that we need to stay ahead of where we find ourselves at the moment.
Hyper automation is a combination of three things: Business Process Management, RPA and AI. It’s a fluffy word, we’ll admit, but it does show a particular drive from businesses to find the key technologies they need to access in the future to have an edge. And while true AI is still a way off, functional AI that can perceive and make decisions for itself is getting closer.
Seeing Is Believing
Document recognition and understanding is a big drive for AI. There is a huge amount of work which goes into reading and collating information. Being able to automate this has huge upside for businesses.
At the moment you have to define a template where all the fields are and tell your bot where to look and what to look for. With AI and Machine Learning, a computer can ‘read’ the information from the page without prior knowledge of what it is going to be looking at.
Hello, Operator?
Take the classic automated voice on the phone telling you “We may record this conversation for training…”. Well, that somewhat trite and hackneyed auto-voice is evolving… and transforming into something quite special.
In near real time, an AI can transcribe the content of a call and begin to detect the emotion of the caller. Imagine how this could work in a call centre environment. The AI would function as the frontline operator, able to pass calls onto a human call handler to help customers. In this way, rather than remove a task, AI can extend the capability of a human.
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
Right now we are automating processes. In the future, bots are going to be able to provide insight and be predictive rather than just being completely procedural. We’re all in on RPA, AI, and Business Process Management so if you’ve got any questions, or think that you want to go further with bots then let us know – we’d love to hear from you.
