Future of RPA

The automation industry has evolved tremendously throughout the world. Imagine if someone told you 20 years ago, that all of your regular, mundane, or everyday tasks will be done by a robot, which you can control. At the moment, it would seem like a mere joke, but who knew this would be the future of automation. There is no debate about the fact that automation has achieved an exponential pace in creation and creativity and has eased and proved to be a blessing to the industry that adopts it. With the help of RPA tools, we would be able to see an incoming new wave towards RPA implementation in various industries. These implementations would not only restrict to big industries but also small and medium-scale industries as well. It is also predicted that this adaptation would lead to the industries establishing their own IT teams. The demand for RPA certified and the ones holding any kind of RPA skills or experience is to be high in demand. Many of the businesses would even adopt RPA as there is a reduction in cyber threats as RPA would help in safe keeping from all the cyber threats and eliminate them.

Many large organizations have already put robotic process automation (RPA) to work in their businesses, yet there is still so much more potential to use the technology to drive better productivity, efficiency and customer service. As RPA becomes smarter in the future, it will deliver even more benefits to enterprises and their customers and workforces.

RPA adoption is soaring in a world where organizations face continued social distancing needs and growing economic pressure as a result of the pandemic. The technology is enabling organizations across the globe to improve efficiencies, enhance the digital customer experience and drive productivity to keep pace with the demands of the new normal. RPA is all about automating repetitive, rule-based digital tasks, with software robots interacting with applications and information sources in much the same way as human workers do.

An accelerated move towards attended automation is one of the trends we see unfolding in the future. Organizations around the world understand that they need to empower their employees via attended automation to automate more processes and maximize the returns on their existing RPA investments. Attended automation, sometimes called desktop automation, extends the functionality of bots even further. An attended automation robot—essentially a digital personal assistant that lives on the desktop—guides employees to deliver a better customer experience together with automating repetitive desktop tasks faster and more accurately. Attended bots take care of mundane tasks like populating forms for the employee and can also provide next best-action and compliance guidance as the customer service representative helps a customer resolve an account query, for example. This provides a bridge between tasks in the back-office and front-office, allowing more complex processes to be automated end-to-end. Consider a use case in the healthcare industry where a health plan administrator could use a mixture of server-based and attended bots to handle administrative functions like claims adjudication, authorizations and coordination of provider services. The back-office bots could get on with updating the CRM application based on details gathered by the call center agents. Attended automations, meanwhile, could help employees with tasks like switching between multiple applications, filling data in multiple places and guiding the employee in real-time to remain compliant and maximize upsell opportunities. This, in turn, frees the employee up to deal with complex customer requests more effectively or to focus on customer service, rather than on data entry.

The next step, which some organizations are already taking, is to blend attended automation and RPA with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools. Variously known as intelligent automation, intelligent process automation, and cognitive RPA, this class of solutions enables enterprises to automate more complex, less rule-based tasks.

Cognitive automation are able to handle exceptions and orchestrate decisions spanning entire processes, compared to RPA, which is about executing repeatable tasks with the highest level of efficiency. Whereas traditional RPA automates processes based on data in structured databases, intelligent automation can also work with unstructured data sources, including scanned documents, emails, letters, and voice recordings.

The technology is ‘cognitive’ in the sense that it mimics human cognitive processes like:

• Learning—acquiring information and contextual rules for using the information
• Reasoning—using context and rules to reach conclusions
• Self-correction—learning from experience

Handling more difficult and complex tasks

These features of cognitive automation mean that it can handle more complex jobs without human intervention. For example, such a solution can, through machine learning, learn how to automatically address an e-mail query about a credit card dispute.

Here are some examples of what the technology can already do, where an RPA platform would integrate with the below cognitive tools:

• Optical character recognition (OCR) and image identification
• Extracting intent and entities
• Text analytics
• Sentiment analysis
• Categorization
• Classification
• Change format detection
• Handwriting identification
• Voice recognition

Benefits include:

• Cognitive automation can transform unstructured data into structured data via natural language processing. This, in turn, allows many processes to be automated via RPA.
• It can handle more and more complex process paths and input types, without needing human input.
• It can learn, expand capabilities, and continually improve certain aspects of its functionality on its own.

What this means for the future is that companies will be able to automate more processes from back-office to front-office and do so in a way that delivers a seamless customer experience. Cognitive automation can help organizations meet expectations in a world where consumers want easy, transparent digital customer journeys.

A telecommunication provider, for example, could use cognitive automation to drive sales, FAQ or helpdesk chatbots. The chatbot could interact with the customer using natural language via chat. If he or she is interested in a smartphone with a monthly data plan, the RPA bots could collect and authenticate all the customer’s personal details, check the customer’s credit score, and send the chatbot an online form to present to the customer in real-time.

The advent of AI automation discovery and no-code tools

It would be remiss to discuss the future of RPA without mentioning how the more sophisticated solutions are simplifying the work involved in discovering candidates for automation and deploying new automations. What’s more, with no-code tools from NICE, it can be surprisingly easy to map processes and build automations as a business user with limited knowledge of coding. AI-driven automation discovery tools are also opening up new possibilities. NICE’s Automation Finder, for instance, uses a discovery technology to collect data on how users interact with applications and applies AI to analyze the data and suggest automation opportunities. Automation Finder leverages real, employee desktop data at scale, extracting and analyzing data from millions of employee desktop actions to ensure accurate results. Fully automated business process discovery ensures fast and accurate identification of the right processes to automate. This is a key element in ensuring successful RPA deployments, enabling organizations to rapidly achieve the desired ROI.

The future of RPA is integrated, intelligent and intuitive

Automation and the technology that facilitates it move quickly. For those who make smart decisions early, this quick advancement is an advantage that allows for agility years into the future. Think back to how organizations viewed the cloud less than a decade ago. The decision to move business-critical information to the cloud was seen as “bleeding edge” and inherently risky. After all, how could you trust the security and longevity of information when you didn’t have on-premise control? Now, however, in an era of dispersed workforces and globalization, the cloud is synonymous with information management and organizational resilience. Those early adopters of cloud-based practices were better situated to adapt to changes brought by time and circumstance (i.e., the pandemic). Comparably, RPA will soon become synonymous with process management. Every business process will be scrutinized through the lens of automation:

This is where RPA as a service (RPAaaS) comes to the forefront. Being a cloud-first resource, it has none of the transition issues that on-premise platforms have, making the service bite-sized, flexible and scalable. With no prohibitive license costs, no infrastructure costs and no restrictive lock-ins, RPAaaS has become a convenient tool of choice in an enterprise’s automation strategy.

The early RPAaaS services gave away free bots like confetti, as though a bot was all that was required to design an automated process. These early offerings lacked an appreciation of the complexities that developers tackle to design a new business service. A typical business service sits in the center of the enterprise’s IT landscape, fetching data from one system and routing data to another. A robust process also needs machine learning to be smart and natural language processing to understand certain nuances. To allow the possibility of process scripts to be written in different languages, access to alternatives like Powershell and SSH would complete the toolkit. A simple “drag and drop” of functionalities in a single environment, from a single subscription platform — one that supports the required technologies in various scripting languages — could power the next step to digital transformation.

We live in exciting times that are volatile and complex yet replete with wonderful technological possibilities. While business leaders do not need to understand the details in the codes and scripts that underlie automation, they do require enough knowledge to make informed decisions that convert to business value. Adopting a technology like RPAaaS can help teams experiment and prioritize candidate clusters in the enterprise amenable to automation. Being on the cloud, they can identify processes that, when automated, will lead to the greatest value for their departments and enterprises without committing to infrastructure or operating licenses.

When considering an RPAaaS solution, start small but think big. Focusing on routine tasks that are repetitive should always be the first port of call. Since 40% of help desk queries are related to password resets, automating these tasks would be a worthy candidate for a POC (proof of concept). For complex processes, it helps to partner with a company that has a track record of helping businesses in your market. Typically, processes span many systems of record and numerous departments. Choosing an RPA platform that integrates with systems — both current and in the planned future — would expand the scope of the processes that could be automated across the enterprise. An intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) would eliminate the need for training required. It helps to be mindful of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the implementation. Many an RPA customer have been surprised by the quiet costs of integrations, consulting, maintenance and training that are all rolled up into an aggregate TCO. Here are some additional things to consider before getting started with RPAaaS, as well as a look at how RPAaaS is able to take advantage of the shortcomings of RPA.

The high availability of the internet has allowed a business to be always on, enabling a business that never sleeps. Previously, IT staff would be left scrambling to buy servers to achieve the optimum load-balanced service, managing the peaks and troughs of business. IT never got it right. It was a bit like throwing a dart in the dark and missing every time. Make sure the RPAaaS offering you are researching can help users scale automation to meet the changing demands of your business.

In the early days, no one had a sense of how many bot licenses would be required, so early RPA customers bought more licenses than required. Some firms bought one bot license for one user, while others purchased one for each process automated. Each bot with its associated license costs racked up huge unnecessary charges. A large part of these bills included unused bots or even bots that were just forgotten. With no tracking in place, the customer was left holding the bag on unutilized shelfware. A quality RPAaaS solution should be able to monitor and track unutilized shelfware.

Conclusion

RPAaaS has re-invigorated the RPA market, with more customers willing to take on RPAaaS due to the low-risk nature involved in trying it out in their own environments. Consider the tips outlined above when investing in an RPAaaS solution, which can be a great addition to an enterprise’s automation strategy.