AI and chatbots deliver next-generation automation today

Within every organisation, there are tasks that are repeated every day, week or month. Often, these tasks are tedious and prevent people from carrying out higher value work. Many of those tasks involve finding, copying, matching and sharing data between systems that are not made to communicate with each other.

As well as stopping employees from utilising their skills to their maximum, the repetitive and often boring nature of these mundane activities can be prone to error. But automation, using tools such as Robotic Process AI powered automation, or RPA, can give people back time and reduce processing errors.

Scott Hunter, the global VP of value engineering at UIPath said we are now moving beyond RPA as new technologies allow us to automate much more complex processes.

“IPA, or intelligent process automation, can automate much longer, more complex tasks. We can look at the office of the CFO, CHRO, SVP of supply chain, SVP of procurement and solve problems in their world,” he said.

For example, recruiters typically spend 40 percent of their time trying to align executive and candidate schedules to schedule job interviews. IPA can be used to create a bot that looks at the interviewer’s calendar, reserve a couple of slots in it and serve them to the candidate.

The candidate selects the slot, and the bot adds it to the interviewer’s schedule and sets up a video call. This frees the HR team to work on more valuable activities.

With large language models such as ChatGPT garnering lots of attention, Hunter said chatbots can be used.

“A chatbot can be asked to prepare a monthly expense and submit it to a manager for approval. The bot automatically mines an inbox and picks up all the emails with an invoice that's associated with an expense report," he said.

"It categorises them and populates an expense report system, and then submits it for approval once it matches all the data."

This evolution layers several different tools. Simple processes have been the low-hanging fruit that RPA has been able to pick. IPA can automate much more complex processes as it leverages chatbots, AI and machine learning.

Access the full Digital as Usual: AI, Automation and Analytics report here.