BOT....why should we care about it?

Whenever someone start talking about robotics process automation. The first thing that comes to our mind is what is BOT? When you look back in the past 5 to 6 years, you will find that around late 2014 & early 2015 Robotic Process Automation (RPA), have roared onto the business world. Today almost every business / organization has deployed or somewhere in the middle of deploying it to drive efficiency and have better ROI from the business process. Robotics process automation and its older smarter cousin Artificial Intelligence has taken the world by storm, promising cheap, fast & good processes in place leading to quick / high ROI. But the question that came to our mind in beginning while the RPA conversation started remaining un-answered......what is BOT or what is RPA? The simplest explanation that comes to my mind is that BOT is a software that runs the software.  RPA is software that simulates the actions that humans make in operating other software. In this way they are virtual humans, copying our actions without tiredness, diversion, or deviation. RPA BOT’s represent the simpler, lower end of the so-called Intelligent Automation (IA) gamut. This starts with rule-based task automation at the simple end, through machine learning, specific artificial intelligence, and then general artificial intelligence at the complex end. It represents the first step towards leveraging this IA workforce in our world.

You will be surprised to know that nearly all the notions, mathematics and methodologies used in IA were created years ago. But what is now changing the nature of automation is a combination of computer processing capacity, Quantities of data, universal connectivity of human & device via social media, mobility or IOT. 

Which now allows the algorithms and concepts of the mid-20th century to come to fruition. Ironically, for this new wave of “intelligent automation” to realize its full potential, we need to fully retire the old wave of automation, and the business processes they enabled.

RPA have been hyper-focused on cutting costs, eliminating waste, increasing efficiency, and doing the same old things they’ve always done, just a tiny bit better. RPA will be many organizations’ first real experience with their cybernetic (joint human-machine) future. And if they can be successful with RPA, then they have a chance of also being successful with Artificial Intelligence and the massive impacts that technology holds for our future.

----------------------------------
----------------------
-------------

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Generative AI & Meta-Leaders

In the wake of advances in generative AI and large language models (LLMs), there is excitement about what the technology means for businesses. But we should not forget that this advancement is also posing a catch-22 situation to the traditional leadership. The transformative potential and rapid acceleration of generative AI are creating an imperative for them to act quickly. They should rethink their skillsets and develop new skillsets like – ability to make better sense of data insights, ability to ask better questions, ability to learn from smart mistakes etc. It is true that ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. In just 5 days since its launch in November last year, it gained one million users, a feat that no other popular online services have managed to achieve. But it is not the only generative AI tool, others include Midjourney and Dall-E for images generation, GitHub Copilot for coding, and even conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN) such as Pix2Pix, developed by ...
Read more

Good automation! Select right process for RPA

Someone said very rightly – “Automation is good, so long as you know exactly where to put the machine.” In all my previous blogs I wrote about BOT failure, ROI Modelling, Cost saving, RPA Governance, CoE, POC, POV etc. But then I realized that before taking a deep dive into any of these subjects, first we need to have a right RPA process identification & prioritization methodology in place. Everybody across the industry agrees that Robotic process automation (RPA) can make a big difference for organizations tormented by repetitive routine processes – the kind that suck up the productivity of people whose time would be better put toward more important work. But many are confused by what seems to be a deceivingly simple question — which are the right processes for RPA? The poor choice of process for initial pilot is the leading root cause for failure to meet customers’ expectations. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) doesn’t suit every process and in majority of cases we don’t have...
Read more

RPA Exception Handling – Be in control

Companies in every major industry are turning to semiautonomous computers (better known as BOTs) to automate large- and small-scale business processes. This technology replaces human intervention in back-office operations, improving operational efficiency, reducing costs and increasing margins. However, organizations cannot employ this technology effectively unless the BOTs are engineered properly. And one of the most important component of this BOT engineering is Exception handling or in simple words right categorization of the errors and then developing solutions around the same to deal with those errors to meet the expectations of the RPA owner. Occasionally, in the course of its work, an RPA BOT definitely encounter a situation it was not programmed to handle – and, in those cases, it will stall. Those cases can be for foreseeable reasons – security or access constraints – or it can be for unforeseeable reasons – like missing or incorrect data. Increasingly, RPA developers are ab...
Read more