Age of Intelligent Automation – Looking beyond bots!

Date posted
17 November 2021
Reading time
5 minutes
Manpreet Singh
Product Consultant · Digital Services

Age of Intelligent Automation - Looking beyond bots!

Gone are the days when bots could only automate rule based and repetitive tasks. Processes that required human judgement within complex scenarios, for example, invoicing processing, could not be fully automated by RPA alone. Now, with organisations embracing new and digitalised ways of working, bots are expected to mimic user actions more closely and automate even those processes that require perception and judgement. When RPA is integrated with cognitive technologies, such as machine learning, NLP, OCR, speech recognition etc, the result is Intelligent Automation (IA), widening the scope of the processes and tasks that can be automated. 

Components of Intelligent Automation 

Intelligent Automation includes a range of different technologies and based on the complexity of the problem at hand, a blend of two or more of these technologies is used to achieve business outcomes. These technologies includes: 

  • Process Mining: An analytical approach to diagnosing business processes as they ‘actually’ exist, then capturing and improving processes based on data analysis 
  • Robotic Process Automation: Non-invasive unattended automation that executes repetitive and largely rules-based processes 
  • Optical Character Recognition: A technique designed to extract characters from images and turn them into machine and human readable text 
  • Machine Learning: A set of supervised and unsupervised algorithms that can ‘learn’ human judgments and automate exceptions and enhance data analytics  
  • Natural Language Processing: Generally regarded as a subset of Deep Learning, it ‘understands’ both written and spoken natural language as well as generates natural language response to queries 
  • Cognitive Workflows: Workflow management tools that can orchestrate end-to-end automation of processes including handoffs between bots and humans 
  • AI Chatbots: An AI program that creates a simulation of human conversation using a variety of methods such as voice, text, gestures and touch. 

Benefits of Intelligent Automation 

The potential benefits of deploying IA include automation of complex processes and more rapid ROI than the investments on stand-alone RPA could deliver. Other benefits could include: 

  • Heightened efficiency: Intelligent automation eliminates many of the “speed bumps” that arise from the need for human intervention, allowing processes to execute more smoothly and efficiently. 
  • Reduction in business costs: By automating some of your business processes, you’ll save money by reducing the amount of time your employees have to spend on these processes. You may be able to pare down your team size, or, alternatively, take on more clients with your new-found time. 
  • Improved compliance and security: In IA, most of the data intensive tasks are done by automations thereby reducing humans’ contact to the data, making the process more secure and traceable. 
  • Workforce agility: If implemented properly, intelligent automation excels at adapting to demand fluctuation. It makes it possible to increase or decrease capacity—almost instantly—at a fraction of the cost of traditional models. This capability can be critical in ensuring peak demand doesn’t negatively affect customer experience or workforce satisfaction. 
  • Improve service times: To stay competitive in an ever-changing landscape, speed is vitally important. IA makes it possible to perform complex tasks almost instantaneously and make processes more efficient which in turn, can help you to retain customers and increase overall customer satisfaction. 
  • Increase employee satisfaction: Using IA for manual, repetitive and time consuming tasks will allow employees to spend more time on strategic, high-value work leading to increased levels of employee satisfaction. 

Helping you to become an Intelligent Enterprise! 

Many organisations are just beginning to leverage Intelligent Automation. As they do so, they would benefit from taking a strategic perspective. Bots can do much more than automate routine process steps. RPA can be a pillar of efforts to digitise businesses and to tap into the power of cognitive technologies. 

Kainos provides Intelligent Automation services to help our clients address their strategic and critical operational challenges. We help clients in a number of ways, ranging from shaping automation strategies and identifying key opportunities to designing and implementing robotic and cognitive enabled business operations and processes at scale, as well as providing robust automated managed services.  

If you want to know more, then contact us and find out how we can help in future proofing your organisation! 

 

About the author

Manpreet Singh
Product Consultant · Digital Services
Manpreet has gained extensive experience over the last 13 years working on large scale business transformations for customers across Europe and the US. He brings the expertise in supporting clients on their automation journey to become intelligent enterprise.