RPA and AI

Tuesday 9th July 12.04pm

For perfectly understandable reasons Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are often mentioned in the same breath. They have several things in common, however, I think there is a merit of looking at them individually. This is more complicated than it might sound as both often utilise each other’s technology. 

Let’s start with AI, and, by saying that this is intended to look at the technology of today and not the science fiction that may, or may not, be available in the future. It is hard not to talk about fantastic futures when self-driving cars are almost common place. 

You could say that AI is available at low cost to the average consumer, at least that Is what Alexa told me to say. The reality is that while a virtual assistant can be snapped up for about ￡60 or less, the development of the solution is costed in telephone numbers of millions. Very generally, cheap to buy expensive to build.

AI is already common in areas ranging from speech recognition and image processing to data learning (machine). It has proven beyond doubt the significant contribution it can make when it comes to medical image analysis and there are many other compelling use cases. More and more AI is being provided as a sub routine that can be plugged in to other systems. This will help the democratisation and adoption, but generally this is a rich boy’s toy.

RPA, by comparison, is a bit bottom up. It essentially says identify a complex task that you can do, but, would prefer not to. If your job is to receive some input, a letter, an email, a phone call, whatever, check something in one or two other systems, make a decision and then take an action, there may well be a Robot with your name on it. The Robots compelling proposition is that it can do it faster, more accurately and without breaks or pay. Starting bottom up is significantly less expensive. You can start small, see results and make incremental steps regarding further investment and adoption.

I am, not for a moment, trying to say one technology is better than the other. Both are game changing and offer incredible advancement for business and society. I believe the question should be, what are the opportunities, how much do they cost and what are the benefits? This question is technology independent.

Call me old school but, start with the big picture, demand absolute clarity and then pick off the low hanging fruit. Our first step in both of the technologies in question is an awareness workshop. This serves the purpose of a broad understanding of the technology and an initial attempt to identify candidate areas for adoption.

The second step is when we get serious. In a relatively short space of time, 1-2 weeks, we produce a Process Model with associated Documentation. The process can be an inch wide and a mile deep, the opposite, or somewhere in between, depending on initial assessment. 

The argument is, that this stuff is complicated and if you start with what you are trying to do first it is easier to make the decisions that need to be made today.

Martyn Richards works for Wishful Thinking Fundamentals Ltd and is Sales Mentor to a range of technology clients