Robotic Process Automation: Traditional Vs AI-Powered

There was a time when we imagined what will happen if Sci-Fi movies become a reality. What if robots or robotic applications become a part of our life? Will robots overpower us in the future? Fast forward to today; those fantasies is now a reality but hopefully in the right way.

We have robots and robotic applications around us now, and no, they are not overpowering us yet. Robots and automation, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, there's so much for the current and the future generation to experience that cannot be expressed in words. Still, we are trying to do that here.

We today, are no more required to instruct robots what to do, how and when, instead, they now have their own ability to think for themselves- just as we do, learn from their surroundings, and act on the basis of experience. In fact, it is getting challenging to discriminate between a human and an intelligent bot already!

Robots and automation, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, people often get confused about such terms as they appear to be functioning similar but are not the same. Where RPA allows organizations to automate human tasks, AI enables the machine to understand the natural language and act like a human, whereas Machine learning is a subset of AI. Don't you worry as today, we are going to clear out the clouds of confusion in your mind regarding them. Let’s get started.

What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

RPA is a software robot that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to mimic human actions and automate high-volume, repeatable tasks-including queries, calculations, transactions, and maintenance of records that have been traditionally performed by humans.

With the introduction of robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation has seen a significant positive impact on capital and labor productivity and the standard of living in countries around the world. The productivity has multiplied, repetitive tasks are now performed faster with accuracy, profit is rising high, organizations are benefitting with speed and cost-effectiveness, the list of benefits is quite long.

So, how AI empowers RPA?

It is explicit that RPA is automating the monotonous and daily routines of a business process, thereby freeing up their workforce for most critical tasks, but with AI, it is a boost of capabilities for RPA. Here’s how.

Adding the superpower of AI to RPA means introducing “judgment calls” and decision-making capabilities into it at a scale, speed, and accuracy than humans are not capable of managing. Actually, it is the three main capabilities of AI that are transforming RPA like never before.

1. AI takes RPA to a whole new and advanced level because of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) ability of AI. RPA learns from experience and improves the process over time due to it. AI enables the interaction with humans and data more and refines the decision-making process, thereby improving efficiency and performance at a lower cost. The amalgamation of AI and RPA benefits more when complex and unstructured data like invoices, excel, email requests in different formats are to be automated, which AI’s natural language processing nature makes it sounds like a piece of cake.
2. Another capability of AI i.e., Optical Character Recognition (OCR), is a boon to document-oriented industries like banking, insurance, legal, retail, manufacturing, law, etc., where it is all a game of documents like invoices, handwritten applications, forms, cheques, etc. Processing such bulk of papers becomes swift and seamless with RPA+OCR.
3. Lastly, machine learning, which studies and decodes the past data and generates patterns and takes actions according to the situations.

How is AI-Powered RPA better than the Traditional one?

The differences between traditional automation vs. AI-powered RPA may sound like humans vs. robots because in traditional it is you instructing the machine to do any task and how while AI-powered sticks to the front-end of your system and carries out functions on its own without requiring you to move to the back-end for anything.

The role of AI can broaden the scope of RPA and extend its activities beyond our imagination. AI technologies, data analysis, prediction, perception, prescription, and reasoning solutions can constitute genuine improvements in areas including data mining, revenue, or expenses predictions, sentiment detections, contextual reasoning, purchase behavior, fraud prediction, next-best-action, and more.

The convergence of AI and RPA is a match made in heaven because of the way it helps accelerating the use of unstructured information. Organizations are cluttered with unstructured data where AI, along with RPA, analyzes, categorizes, and extracts relevant information trapped in unstructured data into clean files, all without the need for humans to watch the process.

So, what about humans?

Well, just because machines are getting smarter and don’t need us to perform tasks, doesn’t mean we are out yet. Traditional or AI-powered, we humans have a role to play, and both are going to stay for a more extended period. Neither are AI-powered RPA going to eliminate traditional RPA because sometimes traditional RPA can outsmart AI-powered when a large quantity of data transfer between systems happen.

Wrapping up

All businesses need an operational boost and want to optimize their processes by lowering operational costs, bringing new business, retaining existing business, improving workforce productivity, enhancing the quality of products and services, etc. And RPA is the push that we all need.