How connected RPA drives collaborative transformation

Connected robotic process automation is delivering huge productivity and efficiency gains across every global industry.

As it evolves, it will drive eye-widening levels of transformation. By enhancing connected robotic process automation’s (RPA) capabilities, it will become faster and better, enabling organizations to innovate and keep pace with ever-changing technology shifts, market demands and threats from competitors.  Ultimately, connected RPA will shape the future of work by enabling those who embrace an automated, digital workforce to perform things that only they can do.

Evolution with smart integration

Connected RPA is compelling as a transformational agent because it’s quick to implement and non-invasive to existing systems. Its digital workers access reads the user interface to interoperate and orchestrate any 3^rd party application, just as a user would. The universal, enterprise integration capabilities built into connected RPA‘s digital workers also enables them to consume intelligent automation skills through a broad ecosystem of complementary technologies so that they can adapt and learn from humans or other systems.

Connected RPA gives business users who understand their organization’s operations the ability to simply create automated processes in a visio-like designer, which are then used by an easy to control digital worker — using the same applications — to manage a task. These users can also be innovative through creating new products or services by easily accessing leading-edge cloud, AI, cognitive and other capabilities through drag and drop, intelligent automation skills from a digital exchange marketplace.

The digital exchange is a shop window for new and emerging technologies. It is a platform that puts powerful, pre-built connected RPA and AI capabilities into the hands of business leaders in the form of downloadable integrations and visual business objects. These assets connect and integrate digital workers, existing systems and processes to technology partners, creating a solid foundation of AI-enabled intelligent automation that’s scalable and sustainable.

The digital exchange works like an app store for intelligent automation, comprising hundreds of applications available for quick download to customers, resellers and technology partners. Companies like ABBYY, Appian, Google and others have collaborated to collectively post hundreds of assets, enabling these partners to bring their capabilities to numerous industries via the digital exchange.

Evolving capabilities of connected RPA

The digital exchange currently offers more than 150 Google APIs, so users can add intelligent automation capabilities to their digital workers on the fly. Integrating with emerging cognitive technologies enables connected RPA’s digital workers to emulate these more human-like skills:

Knowledge & Insight. This is the ability for digital workers to harvest information from several data sources, understand it and deliver previously unattainable insights, which enables organizations to:

• Deploy natural language processing
• Gain new insights into customer behavior
• Leverage real-time analytics
• Report metrics
• Mine data for better understanding of processes
• Use data management to quickly deploy new programs

Visual Perception. This is the ability to read, understand and contextualize visual information digitally, enabling organizations to:

• Leverage optical character recognition so digital workers can work with text just like humans
• Use natural language processing to allow digital workers to understand & interpret human language
• Instantly analyze and understand the meaning of digital images via computer vision

Learning This is the ability to derive contextual meaning from datasets, as well as recognize process

and workflow changes, and adapt accordingly without human intervention, which enables organizations to:

• Leverage true machine learning to give digital workers the ability to learn without being programmed
• Prepare for the future as digital workers process information with a neural network paradigm
• Enable digital workers to model algorithms quickly

Planning and sequencing. This is the ability to optimally plan workflow and workload execution to deliver the best outcomes, which helps organizations to:

• Enable digital workers to instantly and intelligently manage workloads
• Let digital workers auto-scale as needed by business conditions
• Use automatic process mining to analyze business processes based on event logs

Problem Solving. This is the ability to solve logic, business and system problems without intervention, enabling organizations to:

• Use automatic problem detection to ensure the highest levels of service
• Possess problem solving ability to increase productivity throughout all processes
• Achieve digital worker-enabled visualization to gain insight from data

Collaboration. This is the ability to communicate and complete tasks with people, systems and other digital workers, which enables organizations to:

• Use digital workers to reduce time to service customers and improve overall quality
• Empower employees to work with digital workers to elevate their roles and increase contributions
• Deploy chatbots to work with digital workers to autonomously service customers and escalate to humans when needed

Key results

Connected RPA adoption is being driven not just by the promise of greater cost savings and operational efficiencies, but many other criteria too. Key drivers include value creation, productivity increases, improving the customer experience, generating innovative opportunities and gaining more value from staff. Other notable outcomes include achieving higher quality operations, greater workforce agility and more actionable data for customer insights.

In fact, the different ways organizations are using connected RPA is remarkable and groundbreaking. Not only is this technology being used as a catalyst for organizations to enhance business operations, but to reinvent themselves too, making them highly competitive within the markets they serve.

Final thoughts

Moving forward, organizations that employ connected RPA with AI and cognitive technologies will see this as providing a true foundation for enabling collaborative technology innovation to deliver real transformational change across their businesses. In fact, having both human and digital workers operating together, while seamlessly interacting with existing and new applications, will provide the foundation of the future workforce.

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