According to current research, organisations will spend $2.4 billion on RPA and IA transformation in 2022.
As hyper-automation and personalisation take centre stage, intelligent automation is the common winning strategy being leveraged by organisations to transform processes and deliver bottom line impacts.
Intelligent automation (IA) promises customer-centric industries to step forward and combine traditional automation methods with intellectual assets to achieve agility and scale in dynamic environments.
Forrester states that up to 93% of companies aim to reach their digital transformation goals in 2022.
Thus, automation is a top priority in organisations. There are two automation genres that help organisations achieve process efficiencies. The first set of systems is classified as RPA, known to be used for enterprise-scale deployments to automate tasks cost-effectively. The second variety is known as Intelligent Automation (IA) allows tasks to be automated by leveraging cognitive technologies, mimicking the functions of the human brain.
Robot Process Automation automates business processes through logic and structured data input. The software or robot interprets processing transactions, recognizes metadata, and proceeds to perform a wide range of programmed actions.
Intelligent automation combines RPA and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to trigger rapid at length business process automation. The intellectual assets ie robots, AI, and other intelligent technologies, are deployed to perform near human actions without depending on direct human interference.
Intelligent automation creating agile and resilient operations
As per Digital Transformation Statistic 2020, 91% of businesses are engaged in different levels of digital initiative.
Globally, different industries have shifted to a largely remote workforce:
In Korea and Sri Lanka, the healthcare industry is using advanced robots to measure patient temperature, remote hand sanitizer, nutrition, and medicine to protect vital health workers with patients.
In the logistics sector, robots are far more capable of keeping warehouse workers safe and delivery personnel at a short, safe distance while enabling uninterrupted services.
Intelligent automation provides tremendous benefits to reduce risk in the oil and gas industry, both in the field and business operations such as finance, accounting, and human resources.
3 reasons why process automation is essential to succeed?
IA tools enable businesses to be efficient and effective. Whether it is to create the ultimate customer experience, faster service delivery or lower the cost of operation, businesses are leveraging RPA and IA to fast-track growth. Process automation helps overcome the challenges of:
Unavailability of labour and skilled workforce
Lack of communication between departments, especially diverse stakeholders in key positions that don't communicate often
Some tasks consume a tremendous amount of time for humans to perform. Automation allows businesses to achieve favourable outcomes.
Therefore, business leaders are prioritising automation to create new ways of conducting business, especially in front-line activities, with emerging technologies along with RPA and IA delivering exciting solutions.
The significant differences between RPA and IA tools
RPA tools are generally used for rules-based, routine tasks. On the other hand, IA tools can elevate the value by improving non-routine tasks requiring reasoning
IA tools are habitually concentrated to leverage existing business functions and focus on increasing value proposition rather than cost reduction. RPA tools bring efficiencies and cost reduction to the business functions.
RPA technology is at the peak of complete innovation, thus can be implemented much faster. IA tools require higher implementation time.
The RPA supply marketplace is maturing rapidly, and several products have exhibited their value. IA tools are swiftly expanding in capability but generally still remain in a blue ocean development environment.