Business processes or day-to-day business operations are crucial for the survival of a business entity. Organizations employ thousands of workers (depending upon the requirements) to meet the demands and keep their business flowing steadily. This consumes a lot of time and tons of effort. From filing requests to creating contracts, logging data, or processing them, employees spend nearly half of their day doing mundane, unproductive tasks.
What if someone told you that you can automate all of these, relieving your employees and allowing them to focus on better tasks? As fictional as it may sound, process automation is now a reality and actively used by top organizations, streamlining their workflow and improving end-to-end productivity.
What’s more?
Implementation of AI in the BPA space has further accelerated the pace, taking automation to the next level. In case you are not sure what this is and how does AI affects the landscape of business process automation and the business as a whole, this article is all you need. Detailing on the core concepts of RPA and the means with which artificial intelligence has influenced the technology, we help you understand all that’s important.
Without further ado, let’s begin the rollercoaster ride of AI-led business process automation.
Also Read: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence & AI Builder
What is RPA and why AI?
RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation which simply means automating the end-to-end business processes. Within an organization, there are multiple things that complete a task. Consider the task of software development. Even though the main purpose is to design and build the software, it follows documentation. Developers spend a considerable amount of time documenting the process. Similar is the case with law firms that need to process tons of paperwork, even after a case is closed.
With RPA coming into play, all of these not so important tasks can be automated whereby the employees can do something better and productive, given the same work hours.
Read more about: Robotic Process Automation
Now as much as this seems efficient, in order for RPA to be fully effective and to be able to emulate human behavior, it has to have a certain degree of intelligence and hence, AI.
How to implement AI in business operations?
AI or as we say, artificial intelligence is one way of augmenting intelligence into machines. The technology has been in the industry for a long and it is now that experts are trying to fuse one with the other to enhance the overall usability.
AI in business process automation is more like making machines smarter to carry out business tasks. From Amazon’s Alexa to Apple’s Siri, we are all well aware of what smart machine is all about. But that’s not it. In fact, it is the top of the iceberg and there’s a lot more to the technology than we see.
The common scenarios that implicate AI in process automation include:
- Reading and processing documents:
We spend a lot of time reading documents. It could be from a text or an email or any business document. AI aims at equipping tools with the ability to read like humans, process data, and come up with relevant ones without requiring human intervention.
- Analyzing Data:
To read and process data is one thing, to analyze it and be able to drive conclusions is something different and huge. With AI into process automation, you can expect machines to both read, process, and analyze data and also lay predictions. This helps organizations gain a holistic view of their enterprise data and make smarter decisions.
- Act like humans:
Besides dealing or handling data, AI models can effectively be trained to act in a certain manner. Meaning that their application isn’t limited to data but extends beyond that. To be precise, a model can do all it has been trained for.
How AI affects RPA Bots?
Bots performing business operations have been an innovation of its kind. They were programmed to do a certain activity. The drawback here was the bots couldn’t learn from human behavior. In other words, the capabilities were largely restricted.
Artificial Intelligence tends to strengthen the ability of a bot. Owing to the fact that AI models have a self leaning feature, they can track human behavior and also learn from them, doing more than what they have been trained to do. An important thing to note here is that AI bots not only learn from their surrounding but also improve themselves while doing so.
A simple example here could be chess. The model is trained with the basic moves. With time, it learns more moves and becomes stronger day-by-day. Similar is the case with AI-driven RPA bots. They learn and mimic human behavior in an attempt to improve end-to-end efficiency while reducing the time and efforts spent to do a particular task.
Another key advantage of using AI in RPA bots is that they can process data in real-time which further accelerates the amount of data processed every second. Often organizations receive tons of requests at the same. For a human to process such a huge amount of data is tough. AI bots, on the other hand, can do it and pretty fast.
To put it this way, artificial intelligence has the potential to not just transform process automation but revolutionize it and for the good. For organizations who have RPA implemented within their lines of business operation, it’s time to level up and strive for intelligent bots.
And in case you are among the smaller lot who is still not sure if RPA is the need of the hour, it’s high time that you stopped pondering and started acting. RPA and AI together can fuel your business’s growth but only if done in the right way.
Looking for expert guidance related to the business process automation using the optimal technologies?
Get in touch with us at Stridely Solutions and allow us to take your business to great heights. Backed by a team of skilled engineers, we have helped thousands of organizations automate their business. Will you be the next?
