Robotic Process Automation is one of the hottest sectors in technology, automating away low-value systems-based work humans have had to perform. Very early in my working life, I did data entry work, taking data from forms and typing it into a green screen application. It wasn't work that I particularly enjoyed, or that added a huge amount of value to the organisation.

RPA software is implementing cognitive services into its mode of operation - most notably computer vision - for reading screens, documents, etc. - to turn the digital laborer into one with some human like capabilities. So capturing data from forms and entering it into a system is a straightforward proposition. However one thing it lacks is the ability to make decisions beyond predefined "If This Then That" static workflows.

Enter AI

This is where the natural marriage between pure automation and Artificial Intelligence comes in. Using Machine Learning models, decision making based on complex varieties of factors - such as classifying an email or setting a credit risk score - can route a robots decision making process based on an wide and sometimes ambiguous set of inputs. The advantage this gives organisations is that their routine decision making processes become easy to articulate and importantly for customer related decisions - auditable.

How does this help you?

Is your organisation is dragged down by routine work such as document processing? Could you respond to your customers faster if an automated system dealt with a process for you? Then intelligent automation has a home with you, increasing customer satisfaction, making employees more productive (and less bored) and increasing compliance by default.