Advancements in artificial intelligence and automation technologies have significantly disrupted businesses across industries in recent years. As the capabilities of machines continue expanding at an exponential rate, more opportunities are emerging for organizations to optimize processes.
This in turn reduces costs and free up human workers to focus on higher-value tasks. However, leveraging these new technologies also requires navigating challenges around changing job roles, skills development and gaining employee buy-in for technological change.
This article explores several emerging intelligent automation services that are empowering companies to work more efficiently through enhanced collaboration of humans and machines.
1. Robotic Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a software automation technology that uses bots or artificial workers to perform repetitive processes humans have performed according to some rules. These bots can work alongside human employees in performing tasks that used to be routine, such as data entry, processing invoices, or filling forms. This allows human employees to attend to most tasks requiring judgment, problem-solving abilities, and emotional intelligence.
Moreover, as RPA bots never get tired, make mistakes, or need coffee breaks, they can work 24/7 at very high speeds without any drop in productivity. This significantly boosts process throughput and efficiency while reducing costs, highlighting the benefits of intelligent automation services.
Additionally, since RPA bots emulate human actions, they integrate seamlessly into existing applications and systems without requiring extensive redesigning or replacement of backend infrastructure.
2. Cognitive Automation
Taking automation a step further is cognitive automation, which is a technology that can understand, learn from, and augment human cognition and behaviors. While RPA focuses on structured, rule-based processes, Cognitive Automation handles unstructured data and tasks requiring human-level judgment, insight and nuance.
Furthermore, Cognitive Automation gets smarter over time through continuous learning from vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. This enables tasks traditionally seen as complex for machines, such as claims processing, underwriting insurance risk and even medical diagnosis, to be automated with high accuracy.
3. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
Front-facing consumer services have also immensely benefited from automation through the rise of virtual assistants and chatbots. Powered by advanced natural language processing and machine learning techniques, chatbots can understand and respond to human language the way virtual humans would. They simulate honest conversations through voice and text to handle high volumes of basic inquiries from customers. This frees up live agents to focus on more complex issues that require empathy, persuasion or personal relationships.
Consequently, many companies can consistently resolve over 80% of incoming customer queries through chatbots without any human assistance. Easy-to-use virtual assistants enable ‘always on’ customer support at scale across mobile apps, websites and other digital touchpoints around the clock.
As chatbots become more intelligent through continued interactions, they are also able to proactively engage customers, offer personalized recommendations and even address problems before issues arise.
4. Business Process Management Systems
While the above technologies automate standalone processes and tasks, optimizing end-to-end business operations requires an overarching approach with Business Process Management (BPM) systems. These systems digitally map out and model all organizational processes – from lead generation to order fulfillment. Powered by process mining and analytics capabilities, they gain a unified view of performance bottlenecks, non-value adding activities, and compliance risks.
This more profound process visibility enables data-backed redesigning of workflows for maximum efficiency. Automated task routing then ensures the right resources (humans or robots) handle each activity based on cost, skill and time parameters. Integrated RPA, cognitive and case management solutions further streamline execution.
As a result, with BPM, companies gain complete ownership and orchestration of operational imperatives like quality, turnaround times, resource utilization and costs across divisions.
5. Intelligent Document Processing
Digitizing and extracting value from paper-based and unstructured documents is another area transformed through AI-powered automation. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) utilizes machine vision, natural language processing, and machine learning to automate document ingestion, classification, and data and content extraction at scale.
Furthermore, combined with RPA, extracted insights are used to trigger subsequent process steps. As a result, laborious and error-prone manual data re-keying is eliminated. IDP empowers life sciences firms to extract clinical trial insights from research papers, hospitals to digitize medical records and financial organizations to underwrite loans directly from statements – all at the click of a button. This revolutionizes legacy workflows that are dependent on tedious human data entry and analysis.
6. Predictive Analytics
Applying predictive machine learning algorithms to structured and unstructured data sources allows for the automation of decision-making itself. Predictive analytics forecasts outcomes and prescribes actions by identifying complex patterns in huge operational and customer data volumes. It moves beyond simple metrics and report generation to anticipate business situations, prioritize issues, segment customers and optimize resource allocation in real time.
For example, predictive maintenance models monitor equipment parameters to detect anomalies and predict failures before they occur, avoiding unplanned downtime. Customer churn prediction models analyze usage patterns and demographics to identify at-risk accounts for targeted retention.
Fraud detection algorithms flag abnormal financial transactions. With precision and scale beyond human capabilities, predictive analytics help achieve industry-leading performance through continuous optimization based on changing market conditions and behaviors.
Final Thoughts
Emerging intelligent automation is revolutionizing the future of work by unleashing untapped value through human-machine collaboration. Technologies like RPA, cognitive automation, chatbots, BPM systems, IDP and predictive analytics empower organizations across industries to optimize critical processes for accelerated outcomes, reduced costs and superior user experiences.
However, successful automation also requires a carefully planned, people-centric change management approach focused on upskilling workforces, designing equitable job transitions and gaining organizational buy-in.
For enterprises that nurture a culture of intelligent automation, the rewards include sustainable competitive advantages through agility, insights and efficiency that fully empower the capabilities of both humans and machines.
