The Evolution of RPA and IA

In the latest episode of the Futurum Tech Podcast, The Interview Series, Daniel Newman welcomes three experts to talk about robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation (IA). Francis Carden is one of the founders of OpenSpan and is currently VP of Digital Automation and Robotics at Pegasystems. Lee Coulter is CEO of transformAI, and Jon Gilman is CEO of Clear Software. Together, they gave Dan some great insight on the future of RPA and IA.

To start off, they defined RPA as a method of automating existing work, such as rote work people have been doing on their own for years. Think of all the tasks Amazon’s Alexa does now for people, chores that we once had to do ourselves, manually navigating across systems without her help. That’s an example of RPA now.

And while you can use AI to help RPA, you really don’t need to for most tasks, as actual RPA is rules-based task automation. For example, reconciling bank statements in a finance department is a perfect job for RPA, as it’s a rules-based process that can be automated without human involvement. This is where RPA excels.

On the other hand, IA takes different tools in the RPA toolbelt and creates an exoskeleton to help humans get things done faster. IA is necessary when there are lots of paths to go down, requiring some input from humans. For instance, at a call center, there are lots of triggers that could change how a customer service rep helps people. In this situation, a chatbot integration that can take a customer’s phone number and look up information would help get the job done faster.

The three guests went on to explain how they want to get people to stop using RPA as a catch-all term. After all, RPA is essentially a tool inside the toolbelt of intelligent automation. It’s a tactical way to automate tasks, while IA is orchestration of work. And that’s important, since it doesn’t matter if a human or robot does the work, as long as it’s orchestrated from end to end.

During the interview, Francis, Lee, and Jon mentioned that some of the issues with RPA vendors is that they’re saying their products are low code, but they’re not actually replacing the underlying systems. So the best thing to come out of RPA is bringing to life the recognition of how poor some of these systems are, which means maybe we can finally upgrade them and get on the IA journey!

After all, RPA can only get you so far, which many organizations are now realizing. They used it for simple tasks like resetting passwords. Now they want to do bigger things, like using it for a call center. They need orchestration, which should be a single digital experience to be true intelligent automation.

So, what’s next for IA? Well, according to Jon, getting customers into IA is going to be a big effort. It will take a while to have all processes automated, as a huge amount of business process reengineering needs to happen. So, we can’t really claim that in 10 years we’ll have automated 90% of processes. But in the next 20 to 25 years, a huge amount of front office jobs will have disappeared due to automation, leaving people to forget about the mundane tasks that can be automated and focus more on the tasks that require human involvement.

If you want to learn more about what Jon, Francis, and Lee discussed with Dan concerning RPA and IA, be sure to listen to the podcast today!