Sometimes you need more than RPA...

While you can automate many processes with the "basic" RPA, there are always cases when you need more than this. You can of course collect data from disparate sources automatically and process it, but you cannot find patterns and insights to make complex decisions. In order to achieve this, you need AI.

When you have both of them in place, you get the most benefit out of your automations since then you can easily overcome the barriers. AI enables automation of processes that include:

• Uncertainty, when for instance you cannot determine an outcome with 100% certainty (like loan defaults, property valuation)
• High Variability, when there is too much variability to apply any rules (like language translation, resume matching)
• Unstructured Data, since it is pretty challenging to process it (like extracting information from articles, images and videos)

Let's pretend we are a contact centre manager and our agents are receiving thousands of emails every day. We want to know how many of them are complaints and also what kind of complaints. We want to then categorize them and distribute them to the right skilled agents so that they are answered. This is a very typical scenario, where you can and must use automation in order to take the unnecessary load from your agents so that they can focus answering your customers instead of classifying those emails. To make the scenario even more complex, assume that you are receiving emails in 10 different languages...

Without using the AI, which can read the emails, translate them, look into the content, understand if the feeling in an email is positive and negative, you cannot achieve much. And by using it, you can have grateful, happy agents and even happier customers since their emails will be returned quicker...  

At the end, it all comes to allow you to focus on the things you need to do, which is the funnier part of your job, especially when you can become more creative by doing the tasks that also make you more productive. Those things that make you "You" and unique. Marry AI and RPA when you think of automation next time... You will not regret it :) !