Automation technologies are driving a significant change across different segments. As their popularity tends to rise, more and more people are becoming aware of how robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) are impacting their everyday lives. This rising awareness is accompanied by the emergence of new ideas, and also a few misconceptions. 

RPA is a technology that has been widely implemented across a wide range of industries and locations, demonstrating its ability to improve corporate processes and services, while also improving the experience of employees and customers.

Robots use AI to learn from both old and new data, as well as observe and learn from how humans address errors to improve procedures. While RPA is process-driven, AI is data-driven. When RPA robots are infused with AI technology, they become “thinking” or “cognitive” robots, that can make trustworthy data-driven decisions across the company.

Once enterprises start implementing intelligent automation, they pave the way for hyper-automation, in which complicated and exception-prone operations can be automated across the enterprise. 

RPA and AI: How they are different

RPA, also known as software robots, works on hard rules. The actions that an RPA machine performs are understandable and predictable as they work based on the defined rules of a bot. 

On the other hand, artificial intelligence is a less-defined technology. 

Understanding the reason why an AI system performed a particular action or decision is relatively difficult. This is because AI systems learn continuously from surroundings; therefore their decision and behavior are likely to change every time. 

The combined potential of RPA and AI

RPA and AI have quite different use cases but their combined potential can prove highly beneficial for enterprises. The transformative power of these technologies opens up the doors to limitless opportunities. Using RPA as a scalable and secure medium for incorporating AI into processes, dramatically increases process efficiency and brings down the effort and time involved in process execution. Thus, it has a huge impact on driving efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. 

Moreover, technology experts believe that the next phase of growth will be propelled by intelligent automation. As such, the combined power of AI and RPA can bring revolutionary results. It can automate complex tasks that are strenuous and hold back proficient employees. 

In recent years, a lot of organizations have shown keen interest in RPA adoption for streamlining operations. Also, their rigorous effort to maximize productivity with limited resources has persuaded them to jump into the technology realm. 

Intelligent automation i.e. RPA + AI has great benefits. They can help raise customer experience, employee experience, and eliminate repetitive work. Hence, these technologies make a powerful team that can help enterprises grow and advance in a stupendous way. 

Benefits of an AI-powered RPA program

Improving customer experience

One of the most common applications for cognitive robots is the resolution of customer experience-related business challenges. Gartner estimates that conversational agents will handle 20% of all customer service by 2022.

Conversational agents are robots that can intelligently catch a client’s intent and work with back-end corporate systems to provide quick replies to claims and queries, significantly improving the customer experience.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be implemented in a range of front-office applications, including call centers and digital marketing platforms. Organizations may collect data that allows them to construct a holistic view of their customer journey and analyze customer-organization discussions in real-time using intelligent automation.

Optimizing sales capabilities 

RPA + AI can aid sales teams in a variety of sectors by deploying cognitive robots that can perform predictive analysis using Machine Learning models and generate fresh data that predicts future market behavior and assesses likely consequences.

Robots may select leads that are more likely to convert using data, and organizations can use intelligent automation to predict results and have a clear route to the next best action.

Driving back-office efficiency

AI-enhanced RPA, a ‘thinking’ robot that can go into the company CRM and gather inventory data, then use an ML model to estimate next week’s sales statistics, can help organizations automate their real-time inventory management. The robot will alert a human about the need to raise inventory and will request a buy order; the human will simply need to supply the purchase order so the bot may do it on its own.