What makes RPA a must-have for digital transformation?

Employees are seeing more and more software taking over routine, repetitive activities, changing how they do their jobs. In fact, Forrester estimates that by integrating AI and robotic process automation (RPA), more than 40% of businesses are getting ready to build cutting-edge digital workforces.

Today's office workers waste too much time switching between software and frequently need to re-enter or copy and paste the same data, like a customer's name and address information, to finish a task. Employees can concentrate on important tasks and achieve improved precision, speed, and accuracy thanks to RPA's automation of these repetitive manual tasks.

RPA technology allows bots to process and comprehend unstructured data like emails, pictures, and PDFs using AI skills. Because of those characteristics, intelligent bots can recognize and learn new patterns without explicit training. Chatbot services, also known as conversational AI capabilities, allow bots to converse with consumers and customers the same way a person would.

This automation will boost the service desk's productivity and improve customer care. RPA already revolutionizes the automation of business processes.

Benefits of RPA

Thanks to the successful integration of cognitive systems, RPA, and other chatbot technologies, automation eliminated approximately 20% of all service desk interactions. RPA can be used in various industries, including banking, utilities, and finance, to enhance internal operations and customer service. RPA also allows businesses to cut employee expenditures and human error. Here are some instances from various industries:

Improved business process efficiency and operational excellence

When an accountant receives emails about Account Payable, an RPA bot in the finance department automatically extracts the emails, uses machine learning to analyze the PDF attachment, and then inserts the collected data into an ERP.

Enhanced customer experience with more tailored services

An RPA bot can automate repetitive tasks for banking staff, enabling them to quickly send customized contracts and determine whether a consumer is suitable for a loan.

Contextual assistance improves the employee's work experience

An RPA bot in the utility industry can examine data from numerous data silos across multiple systems (such as past consumption or contact details) and then recommend the "next best action" for a customer care representative while the agent is on the phone with the customer.

Better compliance checks

RPA is used in banking to expedite eligibility checks (such as for a loan or credit) and ensure the traceability of required "Know Your Customer" operations.

Shorter time to market with increased agility

RPA enables users to quickly create a new online service or mobile app based on data kept in silos in the information system's digital transformation context.

The evolution forward for Robotic Process Automation

Intelligent RPA emerged with the introduction of artificial intelligence capabilities, and AI has advanced rapidly over the past decade. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms have reached very high levels of confidence and, in many cases, outperformed the human brain thanks to the vast amounts of data now available to train the models.

Artificial intelligence is the solution for the growing number of business scenarios requiring unstructured data, such as photographs, text, and audio, frequently originating from mobile devices. It can be used for a wide range of tasks, including image recognition and comparison, automatic document classification, the extraction of keywords and metadata from invoices and purchase orders, speech-to-text conversion for business systems, and determining the tone and purpose of customer emails sent to the service department. By managing a typical conversation, complete with questions and responses, an RPA robot can serve as a digital assistant that offers a high-quality user experience instead of dealing with a user via a standard UI.

When considering process automation from a wider perspective, intelligent process automation emerges. The concept of business process management (BPM) is not new. BPM offers corporate architectural process documentation to explain the value, process flows, and implement plans. While RPA assists in carrying out repeated rule-based and user-interface-focused tasks, it also automates structured procedures. BPM and RPA function perfectly together and can be smoothly connected; a BPM workflow can activate RPA bots and vice versa. For feeding BPM, RPA can be utilized as middleware to collect data from internal systems or third-party websites. RPA and BPM are working together to help firms develop significantly to benefit more from a digital workplace.

Lastly, RPA's daily users are equally crucial to the technology's development. There will be an increasing amount of community-driven automation material and tools to enable the "citizen developer" as RPA becomes more and more democratic.