Top 10 predictions for AI, Robotic Process Automation and Intelligent Automation in 2019

 1.    2019 will be the year of the true digital worker- you can quote me on that…

RPA alone cannot deliver a fully skilled digital workforce: while it can provision the uptake of data intensive and manual tasks it does not fully cut humans out of the picture. Employees still have to orchestrate processes (often helping along the way too) and action the subsequent processes, ultimately meaning that their time is still being consumed by the same tasks (albeit slightly less).

With the combination of AI, IA and RPA, however, we will be talking about a true digital workforce – not just “bots”. By arming RPA with a cognitive edge, companies will be able to harness human capabilities- such as reading, listening and even talking (well, “chatting”)- within their software: not only making existing processes more intuitive, but broadening the range of processes that are ripe for automation.

2.    AI will drive RPA adoption and RPA will drive AI adoption

The symbiosis of AI and RPA will become increasingly evident as we move into 2019. AI will allow for RPA to be applied to more complex automations and to stretch use cases further, while RPA will give AI a tangible place in the modern workforce as well as future.

In this modern workplace RPA products will continue to focus on structured data and AI & IA will be utilised to read, interpreted and create structure from unstructured data and documents. NLP (conversation and understanding), intelligent data capture and other AI tools will take this unstructured data, turn into structured data and it will be used to support improved decision-making within an organisation. So, AI will drive an increase in the types of use cases that RPA can complete:  AI initiated; RPA executed.

RPA will also account for some of the historic pitfalls of AI business cases. In many cases, RPA could be the key to removing human contribution to AI tasks allowing companies to unleash its full value: without being able to integrate "sexy" unstructured data collection or predictive analysis into your business processes without having to pass it to a person, how can you create a substantial business case for AI?

As companies start to understand that the business case for AI can be enabled by RPA execution (i.e. don’t always pass to a human), we will see more AI projects in 2019.

 3.    Mergers, Acquisitions and development

Large software vendors (i.e. IBM, Oracle, Google, Microsoft) will buy small RPA vendors

As with the SAP acquisition of Contextor, I think we will see a trend of large software companies buying some of the smaller players in the market (It will need to be the smaller players, given the valuations of the larger players). Given these valuations, I also think we will also see a number of players develop their own capabilities to help lower total cost of ownership of their traditional portfolio.

Larger RPA vendor acquire smaller vendor

Given the valuation of these large RPA vendors, I think they will use these to leverage a purchase of smaller RPA vendors – both to take out competition and consume features and components they don’t have. We will also see some AI vendors purchased to supplement their offering into the market. These large RPA vendors are of sufficient scale now to make these purchases and it will also help protect themselves from the big boys (mentioned above)

4.    Chatbots –

Yes we have heard it all before – “2017 - the year of the chatbot” and then “2018 the year of the chatbot”, well actually I believe this is the year of the chatbot*

*if it is plugged into a digital worker… (don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming).

Chatbots are now delivering a good front end experience, but they have not always been integrated into the back end properly. Using a digital worker that is fully integrated into the chatbot (by the way chatbot will include voice as well as chat) will allow for a richer user experience and significantly reduce the cost to service a client.

5.    RQ- Robotic Quotient

This phrase will become part of the lexicon for the industry in 2019. RQ (a term coined by Forrester) is a new means of measuring organizational readiness for automation and AI. RQ measures the ability of individuals and organizations to learn from, adapt to, collaborate with, trust, and generate business results from automated entities, including software like RPA, AI, physical robotics, and related systems.

• High IQ, EQ & RQ = a successful organisation…

6.    People enablement/augmentation

2019 is going to be a year of uncertainty within the jobs market and the economy – Brexit (yes, I mentioned it) being the biggest unknown factor, especially in the UK. Given we are also at historic highs for employment in most of western Europe, the sensible organisations will be looking at how they can not only keep staff, but how they can get more value out of them.

Organisations need to take a holistic view of how they can deliver against their strategic objectives and drive value. This means they will need to take into account not only their human workforce, but the potential of utilising a digital workforce to achieve value:

Short term value

• Remove manual, repetitive tasks
• Increase productivity

Medium term value

• Enhance customer experience
• Increase services and therefore revenue
• Reduce risk and enable compliance

Long term

• Disrupt ingrained business models and create a new products and new ways of working

Training will also become a big focus. As we move from either PoC/PoV’s or small-scale implementations; organisations will require more people to do automation “stuff”. We will see an explosion in roles in automation - build, test, implement (through co-ordinated change management) manage and maintain roles (too many job titles to include). Companies will also begin to market their automation programs in recruiting efforts to attract talent.

7.    Regulatory compliance will drive the need for innovation

In 2019 we will see more innovation pushed by the need to be compliant. One example is in the area of making regulation machine readable and executable – i.e. issuing regulation in code rather than words and then banks responding in code rather than words too. Digital workers will make it easier to run, manage and report on compliance requirements.

8.    The Digital workforce will explode into the public sector in 2019

The goal for public sector bodies could not be more defined: to deliver more (and better) services to their citizens, while minimising resource expenditure. In 2018 we saw the NHS and Local Councils start to look at this and now we have some very successful implementations of digital workers in both sectors, this will give others the confidence to explore how a digital workforce can help them.

 9.    RPA prices will continue to decline for pure RPA vendors

Competition (especially if the large software vendors incorporate RPA into their portfolios), commoditization and different licensing models (consumption, per minute, SaaS etc) will drive down prices for pure RPA vendors. This is why they need to add value to their portfolio's.

10. IoT & 5G roll-out

As with the earlier point “AI will drive RPA”, the ability to collect more information (more IoT devices with sharing a greater amount of data via 5G bandwidth) will drive the number of tasks that can be carried out (especially on legacy systems). Organisations will be able to make more decisions based on the pools of data they can collect and execute these quicker and more effectively by using a digital workforce.

 So there you have it! My little summary of the year ahead.

 Please feel free to reach out to me if you’re interested in learning more about how AI and RPA could benefit your company this year or if you have any points or questions on the topics.

Please note I work for a company called Thoughtonomy, who deliver a lot of these services, but these views are my own.