Artificial intelligence and automation are the terms that can often use interchangeably, considering both are the same, but they are not. While automation is used to work in conjunction with people by automating repetitive processes (attended automation), AI is viewed as a form of technology to replace human labor and automate end-to-end (unattended automation).
What is intelligent automation?
Humans introduce risks; they get tired, and they get bored, anxious, worried. They have all the things that affect how a person’s thinking will affect the work they do as well, but machines do not have feelings. They do their job. A Decade ago, production line went through this process of changing over from using humans for assembly to using robots.
Automation can be defined as a process of making hardware or software that can do things automatically — without human intervention. Simultaneously, AI is all about making machines or software mimic and eventually supersede human behavior and intelligence. So intelligent automation is all about teaching machines simple but repetitive tasks and teaching them to adapt or change their performance according to different conditions, whether it could be a small change or drastic. We can take the example of cleaning robots. Cleaning robots can use sensors to sweep every part of your room but if you add intelligence to it accounts for areas that tend to get messier or even do an extra sweep to get your house cleaner.
Combining Automation and AI
Robotic process automation and AI elements such as machine learning, when combined, form an algorithm called Intelligent process automation, i.e., IPA. In addition, IPA “takes the robot out of the human.” At its extreme, IPA can be called an emerging technology that aggregates fundamental process designing with robot process communication and various machine learning algorithms. And also, it improves customer interactions by simplifying conversations and speeding up processes.
IPA, to its full extent, encompasses five core technologies which are:
- Robotic Process Automation: It is a software automation tool used to automate routine and repetitive tasks such as data extraction and cleaning through existing user interfaces and many more.
- Smart workflow: It is a process-management software tool that can automate routine tasks and communication, thus narrowing the margin of oversight and saving your precious time.
- Machine learning: algorithms that identify patterns in structured data, such as daily performance data, through “supervised” and “unsupervised” learning.
- Natural-language generation (NLG): software engines used to generate text in natural language which in turn create seamless interactions between humans and technology by following rules.
- Cognitive agents: Algorithms that integrate machine learning algorithms and natural language generation to build a virtual agent capable of executing specific tasks like communications, extracting patterns from data, learning from that patterns, and even making decisions from experience and emotion detection.
Benefits of Intelligent Automation
IPA is essential as customers nowadays demand more from the companies; the Salesforce marketing report revealed that 53% of the customers prefer personalized offers, and 62% expect businesses to anticipate their needs. So, IPA technologies can a way to deliver personalized touchpoints for optimal customer experience.
Intelligent process automation improves productivity and efficiency. Automation is to remove error-prone tasks; this saves time and money and enables you to do more with your resources. Manual processes take time and automating them can speed up can save your time.