The working
ecosystem of humans, bots and AI technologies together help businesses achieve
a seamless workflow experience
By Holly Anderson, senior director of product
marketing at K2
Evolving and more sophisticated Artificial
Intelligence (AI)-based technologies are helping organizations make their
automation solutions more intelligent. As AI technology has matured and become
more intuitive, the concept of "intelligent automation" has quickly gained
traction and is revolutionizing how work is done.
Intelligent automation is a business strategy
that integrates AI technologies, like machine learning, natural language
processing, and machine vision, with automation. It is the combination of AI
with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology, which uses AI capabilities to
partially or fully automate manual, repetitive human activities, and Digital
Process Automation (DPA), a digital solution that optimizes processes through
automating manual tasks and orchestrating workflow. The combination of
all of these technologies working together cohesively and using the unique
strengths of each result is intelligent automation. This digital transformation
toolkit of technologies can replace the often mundane and repetitive tasks
previously managed by humans (like data entry) and help businesses improve
efficiency, reduce errors and obtain end-to-end process optimization.
In March 2019, Forrester surveyed over 300 business and
technology decision-makers and found that the business goal of accelerating
digital transformation now outweighs the business goal of cost reduction as the
primary focus of process improvement. Obtaining digital transformation
continues to be a primary objective for businesses in today's competitive and
customer-focused market, and process automation is often the cornerstone to a
company's digital transformation initiative. Deploying digital technologies
like DPA and RPA together helps to advance the integration of intelligent
automation, which ultimately helps accelerate the digital transformation
process.
Organizations are predicted to increase their
adoption of AI-related technologies as AI technology and its capabilities
mature. The RPA market is predicted to grow by $3.97 billion by 2025,
forecasted to experience over a 30 percent increase. The adoption of DPA is
also expected to grow, with the global market of DPA forecasted to expand to over $14 billion by 2024.
The anticipated rapid expansion of these two AI-based technologies reflects how
AI capabilities can augment automation solutions to solve a wide range of
business problems more efficiently. Although it can be challenging and intimidating
for IT professionals to deploy an intelligent
approach to business automation, organizations that leverage both RPA and DPA
with AI technologies can realize a wide range of competitive advantages.
Optimizing and using an intelligent automation-focused
strategy can bring the following technologies to life and achieve these
business benefits:
Reduce
common human errors and improve productivity.
"Intelligent" RPA (RPA) can be used to observe, and learn, what
people are actually doing, and then automate those patterns so people don't
have to do the redundant error-prone work. This automation of certain
repetitive tasks helps open up time for employees, liberating them from
time-consuming, mundane work so they can instead focus on more strategic, higher-value
work. This can also result in improved customer experience. Leveraging the
combination of RPA and AI, businesses are then able to free up employees to better
hone in and address complex customer service issues, helping to enhance the
overall customer experience.
Make
business processes more intuitive and strategic.
Machine learning can be applied during process execution to trigger a new
process or reroute running processes according to predictions. Efficiencies are
achieved because machine learning looks at historical data and uses predictive
analytics to spot trends and make business decisions based on this data.
Leverage
actionable data to save time and improve efficiency. The
AI-technology of natural language processing can take unstructured data, both
spoken and written, to then understand the intent and automate business
processes by grabbing actionable data to reduce time and resources required to
complete certain tasks. One major advantage of AI is its ability to employ
natural language responses, conversational dialogue and language translations
along with the ability to gauge intent to streamline and automate common tasks
such as filling out forms. AI can analyze key phrases within the text of a
user's request to get an idea of a person's intent and automatically fill in a
form with the appropriate information.
Unlock
multi-layered data to make informed business decisions. DPA
technology can connect and integrate data systems into process management
tools. If data is unstructured, AI can transform this into a bot-friendly
format, while also unlocking insights that augment human decision-making
capabilities. With each interaction, the system acquires
more data about how decisions are made, and statistical analysis is applied to
develop rules around decision-making.
In looking forward, it is clear that AI and AI-based
technologies will be instrumental in improving the user experience within the
business workflow. However, ultimately organizations need
to understand the unique value that each technology brings to the table first,
so they can reengineer processes accordingly to truly optimize the benefits of
an intelligent automation approach. When well-planned and executed
strategically, intelligent automation can enable organizations to unlock new
revenue streams, stay ahead of competitors and achieve their digital
transformation goals.
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About the Author
Holly is the senior director of product
marketing at K2 where she leads product messaging, value proposition and
customer communications. She has more than a decade of experience with K2 both
in-house since 2006. Prior to her time with K2 she was a consultant.