What is Robotic Process Automation RPA?

Most businesses are only scratching the surface of cognitive automation and are yet to uncover their full potential. A cognitive automation solution may just be what it takes to revitalize resources and take operational performance to the next level. Cognitive automation may also play a role in automatically inventorying complex business processes.

“As automation becomes even more intelligent and sophisticated, the pace and complexity of automation deployments will accelerate,” predicted Prince Kohli, CTO at Automation Anywhere, a leading RPA vendor. For example, an attended bot can bring up relevant data on an agent’s screen at the optimal moment in a live customer interaction to help the agent upsell the customer to a specific product. Leverage public records, handwritten customer input and scanned documents to perform required KYC checks. Realizing that they can not build every cognitive solution, top RPA companies are investing in encouraging developers to contribute to their marketplaces where a variety of cognitive solutions from different vendors can be purchased. Deloitte Insights and our research centers deliver proprietary research designed to help organizations turn their aspirations into action.

Operations optimization

This makes it easier for business users to provision and customize cognitive automation that reflects their expertise and familiarity with the business. In practice, they may have to work with tool experts to ensure the services are resilient, are secure and address any privacy requirements. Intelligent automation streamlines processes that were otherwise comprised of manual tasks or based on legacy systems, which can be resource-intensive, costly, and prone to human error.

• Because cognitive automation bots are still only trained based on data, these aspects of process automation are more difficult for machines.
• CPA’s adaptive learning ensures continuous improvement, allowing it to adapt to dynamic business scenarios.
• Deploying cognitive tools via bots can be faster, easier, and cheaper than building dedicated platforms.

By automating cognitive tasks, organizations can reduce labor costs and optimize resource allocation. Automated systems can handle tasks more efficiently, requiring fewer human resources and allowing employees to focus on higher-value activities. Task mining and process mining analyze your current business processes to determine which are the best automation candidates.

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“Cognitive automation is not just a different name for intelligent automation and hyper-automation,” said Amardeep Modi, practice director at Everest Group, a technology analysis firm. “Cognitive automation refers to automation of judgment- or knowledge-based tasks or processes using AI.” Most RPA companies have been investing in various ways to build cognitive capabilities but cognitive capabilities of different tools vary of course. The ideal way would be to test the RPA tool to be procured against the cognitive capabilities required by the process you will automate in your company.

NLP and ML algorithms classify the conveyed emotions, attitudes or opinions, determining whether the tone of the message is positive, negative or neutral. Difficulty in scaling

While RPA can perform multiple simultaneous operations, it can prove difficult to scale in an enterprise due to regulatory updates or internal changes. According to a Forrester report, 52% of customers claim they struggle with scaling their RPA program. A company must have 100 or more active working robots to qualify as an advanced program, but few RPA initiatives progress beyond the first 10 bots.

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It must also be able to complete its functions with minimal-to-no human intervention on any level. To manage this enormous data-management demand and turn it into actionable planning and implementation, companies must have a tool that provides enhanced market prediction and visibility. Technological and digital advancement are the primary drivers in the modern enterprise, which must confront the hurdles of ever-increasing scale, complexity, and pace in practically every industry. These technologies are coming together to understand how people, processes and content interact together and in order to completely reengineer how they work together. “With cognitive automation, CIOs can move the needle to high-value, high-frequency automations and have a bigger impact on the bottom line,” said Jon Knisley, principal of automation and process excellence at FortressIQ. These areas include data and systems architecture, infrastructure accessibility and operational connectivity to the business.

According to McKinsey, the landscape of workplace activities is evolving as companies embrace the concept of ‘unbundling’ and ‘rebundling’ tasks. Their survey shows that 40 percent of automation and AI extensive adopters plan to reallocate tasks from high-skill workers to those with lower skill levels, enabling more efficient use of workforce qualifications. This transformation not only boosts productivity but also creates a fresh array of middle-skill jobs, often referred to as ‘new-collar’ roles.

What is Cognitive Automation?

The company implemented a cognitive automation application based on established global standards to automate categorization at the local level. The incoming data from retailers and vendors, which consisted of multiple formats such as text and images, are now processed using cognitive automation capabilities. The local datasets are matched with global standards to create a new set of clean, structured data. This approach led to 98.5% accuracy in product categorization and reduced manual efforts by 80%. Deploying cognitive tools via bots can be faster, easier, and cheaper than building dedicated platforms. By “plugging” cognitive tools into RPA, enterprises can leverage cognitive technologies without IT infrastructure investments or large-scale process re-engineering.

Deloitte provides Robotic and Cognitive Automation (RCA) services to help our clients address their strategic and critical operational challenges. Our approach places business outcomes and successful workforce integration of these RCA technologies at the heart of what we do, driven heavily by our deep industry cognitive process automation tools and functional knowledge. Our thought leadership and strong relationships with both established and emerging tool vendors enables us and our clients to stay at the leading edge of this new frontier. Cognitive automation performs advanced, complex tasks with its ability to read and understand unstructured data.

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Besides the application at hand, we found that two important dimensions lay in (1) the budget and (2) the required Machine Learning capabilities. This article will explain to you in detail which cognitive automation solutions are available for your company and hopefully guide you to the most suitable one according to your needs. Cognitive automation tools such as employee onboarding bots can help by taking care of many required tasks in a fast, efficient, predictable and error-free manner. This can include automatically creating computer credentials and Slack logins, enrolling new hires into trainings based on their department and scheduling recurring meetings with their managers all before they sit at their desk for the first time.

To meet these demands, enterprises must analyze and process vast amounts of customer data to gain valuable insights and deliver tailored solutions—which is most likely to become arduous if attempted manually in the absence of intelligent automation. The past few decades of enterprise automation have seen great efficiency automating repetitive functions that require integration or interaction across a range of systems. Businesses are having success when it comes to automating simple and repetitive tasks that might be considered busywork for human employees. Just about every industry is currently seeing efficiency gains, with various automation tasks helping businesses to cut costs on human capital and free up employees to focus on more relevant or higher-value tasks. Traditional RPA is mainly limited to automating processes (which may or may not involve structured data) that need swift, repetitive actions without much contextual analysis or dealing with contingencies. In other words, the automation of business processes provided by them is mainly limited to finishing tasks within a rigid rule set.

Figure 2 illustrates how RPA and a cognitive tool might work in tandem to produce end-to-end automation of the process shown in figure 1 above. Imagine you are a golfer standing on the tee and you need to get your ball 400 yards down the fairway over the bunkers, onto the green and into the hole. If you are standing there holding only a putter, i.e. an AI tool, you will probably find it extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to proceed.

• Cognitive automation simulates human thought and subsequent actions to analyze and operate with accuracy and consistency.
• And using its AI capabilities, a digital worker can even identify patterns or trends that might have gone previously unnoticed by their human counterparts.
• Anthony Macciola, chief innovation officer at Abbyy, said two of the biggest benefits of cognitive automation initiatives have been creating exceptional CX and driving operational excellence.
• Cognitive automation is also starting to enhance operational excellence by complementing RPA bots, conversational AI chatbots, virtual assistants and business intelligence dashboards.

It can also include other automation approaches such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to read and analyze data in different formats. On the other hand, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) served as the predecessor to CPA, laying the foundation for intelligent automation. RPA is designed to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks by mimicking human actions on user interfaces. While RPA significantly improved operational efficiency, it lacked the cognitive capabilities required to handle complex tasks that involve unstructured data and decision-making. Vendors claim that 70-80% of corporate knowledge tasks can be automated with increased cognitive capabilities.

Committed to simplicity, the no-code AI platform doesn’t require tech experts to leverage the power of intelligent automation. From AI Recruiters to AI Customer Care Executives to AI Accounts Payable Executives, the AI co-workers built on E42 are easy to deploy and manage. Companies looking for automation functionality will likely consider both Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and cognitive automation systems. While both traditional RPA and cognitive automation provide smart and efficient process automation tools, there are many differences in scope, methodology, processing capabilities, and overall benefits for the business. Using more cognitive automation, companies can experience a significant boost in performance-related business outcomes, consolidate dozens of systems into just a handful of coordinated processes and accelerate customer service response times tenfold.