Its not RPA or AI silly! Its Automation and Prediction!

RPA and AI buzz words are everywhere. Combined together both are marketed as the drivers of the 4th Industrial revolution. The “AI” terminology has suddenly started to show up in every marketing brochure from any Company which has something to do with Technology. Pundits (most of whom, may not have done well in their High School Stats class) are claiming to be AI experts and predict the AI future with ever increasing references to things like Chatbots, Self-Driving cars etc.  

With that type of hype, the pressure is on the Corner Offices of every large, medium and even smaller companies to do something about “AI”. Now comes the hard part. What do you do with AI? For starters, let’s not refer to it as “AI” or “Neural Networks” or “Machine Learning” or “NLP” ..Let’s just call it a “Prediction” Technology based on Math and Statistics based algorithms. Let’s also keep in mind that “Prediction” Technology is just that. It’s a Technology that uses Data and Models to predict Outcomes and as more data is fed to the models, they predict better. Let's also keep in mind that due to the predictive nature of this Technology, its not perfect. Models only predict based on how they are trained or what data is fed to them.

Similarly, let’s not try to explain people what RPA is by fancy looking Robot pictures but explain it to them as “Automation” Technology. Let’s keep in mind that there are still Corner Office Decision makers who refer to CRM as a “Contacts Database” rather than the official IT terminology “Customer Relationship Management”.

So why is Automation and Prediction (aka RPA and AI) so important? I am going to explain it WITHOUT using the RPA or AI Buzz words. 

Let’s take an example of a Digital Marketing and Messaging firm which I am an Investor in. Our Product uses Messaging to deliver Marketing promotions to Customers and has built in eCommerce functionality. This is fairly typical of Digital Marketing products. Like many other Digital Marketing products, Campaigns had to be setup, Customer information had to be configured and lot of manual work had to be done before a Campaign could go live. This was a perfect Candidate for “Automation” so we automated using Programming and Automation so that Campaigns execute automatically based on set of rules and input parameters.

We then realized that what if we could add “Prediction” to our Automated Campaigns. So we are using “Prediction” technology to analyze our Customer segmentation data from a boat load of prior campaigns and make our “Automated Campaigns” even more smarter. So now our System, can run specific campaigns on specific set of Customers at specific times with specific Offers. Best of all, our Software “learns” to “predict” better as it continuously feeds itself the data from the campaigns that it keeps on executing. Net result is that we send fewer messages and get more engagements because we get better at predicting who is more likely to respond to our offer.

Automation and Prediction Technology is all about either increasing Revenue or reducing Cost and making the Business more efficient. The glamour associated with it is overhyped, unless one knows what to do it with to make a Business impact.

There you have it. It’s not RPA or AI silly! Its Automation and Prediction!