Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a transformative tool, enabling repetitious, routine computer-based tasks to be run automatically. But RPA can become a yet more powerful intelligent automation tool when coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Enhancing business process automations with AI enables even greater opportunities for organizations to reduce costs, improve accuracy, increase productivity, better understand customer needs, enrich the customer experience, and communicate more effectively.
How AI Enhances RPA
RPA achieves a higher quality yield at a lower entry cost than a human workforce alone – and in less time. RPA can tackle IT support processes and workflow processes, and it excels at back-office work. While RPA uses very structured inputs and logic, AI uses exclusively unstructured inputs, and it develops its own logic. AI enables documents to be read and analyzed in any language, images to be read and deciphered, and speech to be understood. AI allows automations, or “bots”, to perform cognitive tasks while they navigate uncertainty, and to resolve inconsistencies quickly, thus creating a bigger impact than RPA alone. AI and RPA together enable you to get projects into production faster, with AI as the “thinking” piece and RPA as the “doing” piece.
RPA mimics human actions, such as keyboard strikes, but AI continuously learns and improves from humans. AI can emulate much of the decision-making and problem-solving that has traditionally been done by humans. This ability, in turn, expands the types of work that can be automated, because bots using RPA only are restricted to following logic, and cannot make decisions. AI, however, can provide the cognitive response and then transmit it directly to RPA to complete the task.
The future of AI
AI is driving industry forward at a fast pace. The following forecasts are predicting major growth in the area of AI:
- AI will be a $200 billion global market by 2026 – Forbes
- 85% of enterprises will combine human expertise with AI, Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) by 2026 – International Data Corporation
- AI will experience $6.6 trillion dollar productivity growth by the year 2030 – PwC Research
- Worldwide AI software revenues of $62 billion in 2022, a single-year increase of 21.3% – Gartner Report
RPA and AI: A Powerful Combination
As we have seen, the dynamic duo of AI and RPA creates powerful automation possibilities out of the reach of RPA alone. Here are some of the areas for which businesses are currently using this combination:
- Task Analysis
- Invoice Processing
- Claims Processing
- Email Management
- Prediction Validation
- Sick Leave Processing
- Child Support Processing
- Tax Forms Management
- Real Estate Financial Operations
AI coupled with RPA empowers bots to work with messy, unstructured data in any configuration, such as non-uniform invoices and forms. The bots can handle such widely varied processes as data extraction, providing email routing and responses, converting speech to text, performing language translation, and even making purchase decisions. Combining AI with RPA helps reduce the amount of analysis that has historically been performed by the human workforce, streamlining processes and freeing your personnel to focus on less mundane tasks that can provide the greatest impact to the business.
Now that you know a little more about the power of combining AI with RPA… let’s create great things together. Contact Synch-Solutions today to get started on your automation journey!