Robotic Process Automation Vs Intelligent Automation, aren’t they the same thing?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can be explained as software technology that can mimic human interactions and tasks with digital systems through a software robot or ‘bot.’

This ‘bot’ can then perform these tasks on physical or virtual machines processing great volumes at high speeds.

Intelligent Automation (IA) on the other hand combines RPA with more advanced technologies to create end-to-end business processes that think, learn and adapt on their own making the entire automation process more streamlined and efficient. Some of these technologies include artificial intelligence, analytics, optical character recognition, machine learning and process mining to name a few. 

The difference between the two technologies lies in the services they can provide with intelligent automation incorporating such services as OCR with document understanding to allow robots to understand and recognize pdfs, images, scans and the potential of handwritten forms. A fitting example of this would be invoice processing where a robot can process 100’s of invoices per day with little to no human interaction.

With intelligent automation incorporating machine learning it would be possible to train the robot to recognize different invoicing templates offering a greater range of processing without having manual intervention from a human.

This is where intelligent automation stands out as it provides a superior range of services and capabilities to tackle more complex problems and delivers the most efficient solutions.