I had the pleasure of representing SD Digital’s Intelligent Automation Team at Automation Anywhere’s Imagine 2024 Conference in Austin, Texas.
It was a busy week connecting with current and former colleagues, fellow partners and representatives of Automation Anywhere. The agenda was packed with client success stories, transformative use-cases and, of course, some authentic Texas cuisine.
Here some important insights I garnered from the event.
Virtual Agents
The next wave of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) has already arrived in the form of Virtual Agents. Virtual Agents use natural language processing (NLP) to query against datasets and see through the resolution of the request.
An analogy that resonated with me compared Artificial Intelligence to a doctor’s visit. If your doctor only diagnosed your issue, it would fall short of meeting expectations, as you want your doctor to not only diagnose but prescribe a remedy to your symptoms.
The same is true for Artificial Intelligence: identifying and/or summarizing a problem isn’t enough. The real value is in taking actions to resolve the problem. Virtual Agents provide industry expertise, allowing organizations to transform their operations to fit their specific business needs.
Human-In-The-Loop
This is not a new concept and certainly not limited to AI use-cases. For years, automation programs have strived to improve the collaboration between humans and bots; for example, in the handling of exceptions and reprocessing of tasks and or records.
The need for such collaboration has been amplified in recent years, as AI autonomously operating throughout an organization presents a level of risk that makes some decision-makers uncomfortable.
As adoption of AI becomes necessary for business to remain competitive, guardrails will need to be in place to instill confidence during the early stages of implementation. Eventually, these guardrails will be able to be walked back, but 100% straight-through processing (e.g. 100% success rate) will always be an impractical goal. Automation Anywhere’s introduction of forms has enabled developers to create custom user-interfaces that can be embedded in the applications that employees are already using to perform their job.
Automation as a Platform
One indicator that an organization needs automation is if the applications supporting the business operate in siloes. Traditional automation aimed to break these siloes and integrate applications across an organization.
However, over the past several years, the number of companies offering AI-based products and application specific AI is exponentially on the rise. It’s becoming more prevalent to have AI built into an organization’s CRM, ERP and other SaaS applications.
This ultimately recreates siloes, this time in the form of AI. There is a direct correlation between the volume and integrity of data and the quality of AI outputs, highlighting the need for an automation platform.
Importance of an Intelligent Automation Partner
When speaking with customers, it was apparent that many teams were stretched too thin to handle all the responsibilities of maintaining a successful automation program. To achieve optimal outcomes, resources should be allocated to support, enhancements, new development and strategic initiatives.
Bound by a finite number of resources, organizations typically neglect one (or more) of these areas, highlighting why a partner is more important now than ever. A good partner should not only meet you where you are in your automation journey but be able to bridge resource gaps in any of these areas.
By doing so, the partner enables customers to experience success while preserving the ability to choose if/when they invest in human capital for a self-sustaining program.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to me at [email protected] to discuss any of these topics in more detail or for a more technical explanation.
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