RPA VS AI (OR ARE THEY BETTER TOGETHER?)

The pace at which technology is changing leaves many businesses out of breath, attempting to keep up and stay relevant. This hectic pace of disruption is only going to increase in the future.

As people continue to engage digitally and set the stage for connecting with computers using natural language interfaces, businesses, especially in the service industry, will not be far behind in leveraging AI to drive customer experience and, consequently, business growth.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are two of the top-notch technologies for enterprises. Both AI and RPA help enterprises achieve their goals, be it in customer satisfaction or employee confidence. These technologies also reduce OpEx to a great extent.

RPA uses software robots to automate redundant business processes. These robots perform the task, in the same manner, each time they are assigned to do. Neither do they learn from repetition, nor do they improvise.

The RPA robots are more like virtual assistants who help offload repetitive tasks that are not complicated but consume a lot of time. Using RPA, enterprises can benefit in various ways like accuracy, compliance, speed, reliability, and improved employee morale.

RPA is a great tool for automating tasks that are very straightforward and are not much complex. For more complex tasks, AI comes into play for automation.

Augmenting Automation with AI

AI relates to building smart machines capable of doing tasks that require human intelligence like planning, learning, reasoning, problem solving, perception, manipulation, social intelligence, and creativity. There are several applications of AI, some of the most common these days are the tasks performed by Siri virtual assistant on the Apple iPhone, self-driving cars, etc.

AI is a flexible form of intelligence and is fully capable of learning how to carry out different tasks differently. The biggest breakthrough in AI has been in the field of Machine Learning, particularly deep learning.

AI is also becoming a major driver for business transformation and is changing the way businesses operate. It can bring together data and intelligence to deliver newer ways and means of doing business for companies. At the same time, AI has the power to affect our buying decisions by leveraging the benefits of cloud computing, mobility, and big data.

AI-powered intelligence agents can make static content much conversational. Conversational AI can cut through various process layers to connect the user to desired outcomes quickly, accurately, and in a scalable manner. This indicates that such agents can recommend highly relevant offers and trigger proactive alerts to prevent customer frustration and, ultimately, attrition rate.

AI can make human agents smarter. Some high-end professional services companies prefer human agents for handling all service calls, but they can act even more diligently when a chatbot is prompting them with additional information. For example, in case of a new discount or an out-of-stock product, the bot will bring it to the agent’s attention. According to an estimate by the research firm Gartner, 30% of all the enterprises will employ AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes by 2020.

Conversational AI could be improvised with human supervision. If virtual agents could not figure out things, a human supervisor is of great help. In customer service through online chat, a human agent can co-ordinate multiple conversations between chatbots and customers. This simultaneously results in a far higher level of productivity than the case wherein the agents were resolving the queries themselves.

Can AI and RPA work together?

As enterprises continuously look to automate complex business processes with data from unstructured sources, including scanned documents, emails, letters, and natural speech, they require more cognitive capabilities.

There are lots of possibilities for effective automation growth if RPA can get a pair with AI. RPA is shifting its focus from just assisting in automating to seeding automated bots into various processes and systems. The level of intelligence of these bots or agents is elevating gradually, all thanks to AI.

Converging AI with RPA enables enterprises to automate complex, end-to-end tasks more than ever before and then integrate predictive modeling and insights into these processes to help humans beings work in a smarter and faster manner.

RPA and AI can work together through the means of intelligent bots. RPA’s “Automation Anywhere” tool allows bots to do self-learning through the “IQ Bot.” By integrating traditional RPA techniques with AI, these bots can perform multiple tasks such as recognizing unstructured data, learning from the feedback by humans, etc.

By integrating AI and RPA, enterprises can complete more cognitive tasks rather than doing simple step-by-step processes, as these processes require little decision making. AI enables basic automation to get transform into something much more complex by integrating a more ‘human’ response into the workflow. Converging AI with RPA will let your business to automate in a much systematic and intelligent manner. Like more complex, end-to-end processes whilst integrating insights into these and simultaneously helping humans work smarter and faster than ever before.

The combination of AI and RPA helps in more knowledge-intensive tasks such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), which can search for structured and unstructured data; filter it for the presence of knowledge, which is represented by the presence of entities and relations. This huge knowledge can be captured by flexible knowledge that can be leveraged in various journeys, processes, or systems. The mix of unstructured data will probably include image, voice, and video.

With the advancement of AI to include activities like judgment, RPA can make informed decisions by leveraging the combination of AI & analytics.

Moving forward, AI will put the application of predictive analytics, then there RPA should be able to capture exceptions and match these patterns or toevents all the possible opportunities or threats.

The combination of AI and RPA will mature with years to come, and then the bots will play even a bigger role to make automation possible so that the more complex and complicated work could also be completed. In the future, these automation tools will be able to assist human beings better than ever before.

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