We’ve been hearing a lot about AI lately; it’s taking the world by storm through emerging technologies like generative AI and predictive AI.

That begs the question:

• What if computers could not only work for us but also work like us – and better?
• What if computers could make decisions, solve problems, hold intelligent conversations, write outlines, help develop automations or generate pictures?
• Finally, how can we use AI to make our lives easier? Use it to become more successful?

How To Level Up Success With AI & RPA

Often, we think of robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) as separate entities. But with the ever-evolving world of automation and AI technology, that’s no longer the case. AI is changing RPA for the better, putting more intelligence in processes across businesses. While RPA exceeds market predictions, AI continues to drive greater value. According to 2023 predictions from Forrester, 10% of Fortune 500 enterprises will generate content using AI tools. And it won’t stop there.

How does AI work for automating business processes?

AI is a learning technology with a lot of potential, from cognitive algorithms to AI-powered industry innovation. But to use it in an enterprise setting, it requires good governance achieved through guardrails. Intelligent automation (IA) platforms like SS&C Blue Prism’s enterprise AI platform bring together artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML) and robotic process automation with other technologies to scale automations end-to-end using a digital workforce.

It does all this while providing guardrails for your AI training models so you can confidently automate and scale robust solutions across the enterprise.

Both RPA and AI have their advantages, but to get the best optimization for your business processes, you’ve got to marry the two; that’s where you get intelligent automation. Because as much as RPA focuses on automating rules-based tasks, especially repetitive tasks, AI simulates human intelligence through computer systems – meaning the two have great potential when they collaborate, tackling complex tasks and decisions faster than a human could, while still keeping a human in the loop to monitor and confirm outputs.

What’s the Difference Between AI and RPA?

RPA

RPA uses software robots to automate repetitive business processes, mimicking human actions to offload dull, routine tasks from human employees. That in turn boosts employee engagement and morale, allowing them to focus on more interesting, strategic work. RPA runs automated tasks efficiently and without error, acting under the instructions for which they’re programmed.

AI

AI is capable of cognitive learning, reasoning and identifying errors and efficiencies for correction. There’s an expanse of applications within AI technologies including machine learning (ML), intelligent document processing (IDP), optical character recognition (OCR), natural speech, speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP).

By introducing AI-powered RPA robots, you get intelligent digital workers following contextual rules and learning as they go to complete more complex tasks. These digital workers, also called AI enterprise agents, can perform on different levels of automation: independently as ”unattended” automation or with your people as “attended” automation.

Digital workers perform without breaks to improve employee workflows, reduce errors, increase productivity and achieve customer satisfaction by providing quicker service.

In the four primary areas where artificial intelligence and robotic process automation are quickly progressing – chatbots, unstructured content, IoT sensors and analytics – the ability to capture greater insight from unstructured data is center stage in making robots more intelligent.

Together, RPA and AI are the ultimate team-up, called your digital AI workforce.

How Are Organizations Using AI and RPA Together?

Let’s set aside the hypothetical for a moment and look at what SS&C Blue Prism customers are doing today with our enterprise AI solutions.

Delivering customer and employee benefits with RPA & AI

As one of the largest financial institutions in Denmark, Danica Pensions is determined to provide outstanding customer service. They wanted to give their customers swift responses to their inquiries.

Danica Pensions brought in a team of 129 digital workers to assist their employees in completing back-office and frontline work. Alongside that, they infused their digital workers with AI to improve their anti-money laundering (AML) and due diligence efforts, ensuring their customers’ transactions are always secure.

Sandie Lindblad, first vice president of operational excellence at Danica Pensions says, “The next step with AI and intelligent automation is to make our digital customer engagement more personal than we’ve been able to make it before.”

Read the full case study to discover more about Danica Pensions’ journey with SS&C Blue Prism.

Responding faster with generative AI

The Spanish retail bank ABANCA delivers personalized service to millions of customers, and they’ve invested significantly in digital banking services for their customers. Now, they’re taking their digital transformation efforts further with SS&C Blue Prism IA, generative AI and NLP. They’ve increased their customer response times by 60% and have automated more than a thousand tasks, improving operational efficiency and employee productivity. Digital workers have delivered 1.2 million hours back to the business so far.

Read the full story to see how ABANCA accomplished these outstanding results.

Why Is Unstructured Data So Important for Intelligent Process Automation?

Unstructured data makes for great automation opportunities. A vast number of companies’ data is sitting on dozens or even hundreds of terabytes of unstructured data. So, it’s hardly a surprise that organizations want proven solutions to accelerate the use of unstructured information and unleash the full potential of intelligent robotic process automation.

To close the process gap, the focus remains on analytics, gen AI and predictive AI. Nearly half of organizations will use a combination of AI and automation software to create a new digital workforce.

Using unstructured data in an RPA process

Think about the following scenarios that may impact the use of unstructured data while building an RPA process:

• When you need to classify documents against specific customers’ taxonomy and behave accordingly.
• When understanding the content of documents is relevant.
• When you need to apply reasoning before extracting information.
• When you need to also discover related links to the data you extract to use in the process.

In the above scenarios, the collaboration between AI and RPA extends and improves the reach of intelligent automation by accelerating the use of unstructured information.

AI makes all relevant data immediately useful and actionable in RPA. It analyzes, categorizes and extracts relevant information trapped in unstructured data (such as text fields of various business rules, documents, purchase orders, invoices, emails, survey reports, forms, etc.) to organize it into clean files for robotic process automation.

How Do AI and RPA Work Together?

When you put RPA and AI together, you get intelligent process automation or intelligent automation (IA). IA combines these two, plus machine learning and other AI-based automations to optimize workflows, streamline processes and bring about total digital transformation in an organization.

Intelligent automation software turns RPA robots into a digital workforce driven by cognitive automation, processing tasks in increasing complexity.

RPA and machine learning

With an AI model powering your automation efforts, RPA bots can perform their current capabilities with the added ability of decision-making. Machine learning (ML) is where these bots start problem-solving and offering suggestions for improvement.

Machine learning is the branch of AI that uses data and algorithms to imitate human learning functions, improving as it goes. With machine learning models, these AI-powered software robots can help with forecasting and predictive outcomes.

AI and RPA teaming up

AI improves the output of complex, even more mission-critical intelligent RPA workflows. At the same time, RPA is the ideal complement to enable the adoption of effective automation with cognitive AI capabilities at scale.

As a result, companies can get the benefits of automation from both technologies by using a unified, all-in-one platform to automate processes and easily exploit the value of intelligence functionalities.

The integration of SS&C Blue Prism’s enterprise AI automation capabilities delivers improved labor efficiency and productivity while accomplishing higher levels of accuracy in unstructured data access – extending business automation to new strategic areas by automating tasks that once were reserved only for humans.

What Is An Example of RPA and AI?

There are tons of examples where AI gives RPA software bots a boost in capabilities, but here we’ll focus on just a few:

• Email management: Robots scan through email data to detect urgency, issues and purpose, and even extract crucial information to usher in quicker response times and easier topic organization.
• Invoice processing: With AI-powered robots working through payment processing systems, the invoice processing time is cut down dramatically, making it far more accurate.
• Finance transactions: RPA and AI together can ensure security and accuracy in financial transactions by capturing a user’s data from various sources and detecting potential fraud by scanning for inconsistent activities. Machine learning helps with predictive analysis when spotting red flags in future transactions based on previous experience.
• Communication experiences: You can use your bots to scan through employee and customer experiences to find where improvements can be made and any issues that arise can be quickly amended, ensuring nothing is missed and helping provide more personalized and efficient services.

What Are the Benefits of RPA and AI?

Now that you know what artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) are and how they can work effectively together, there’s only one thing left to do: Talk about the benefits! Digital works have the potential to totally transform your automation journey, from good to outstanding.

The list is extensive, but here’s our summary of the four main benefits you can achieve with RPA and AI together:

• Improved employee satisfaction: Employees are freed from boring, repetitive tasks so they can focus on higher-value work.

• Efficiency: Processes are streamlined for faster time to results.

• Accuracy: Fewer human errors result when automating processes, which furthers efficiency.

• Consistency and compliance: Because there are fewer errors and work done by following rules, your digital workers keep clear audit trails to ensure your compliance requirements are always adhered to.

What Are My Next Steps?

The best way to get the most out of your AI and RPA solutions is to use a unified enterprise solution, where you can orchestrate your people with your digital workers, systems and processes. AI is on the rise, and your business processes can benefit from it.

Get started with SS&C Blue Prism’s enterprise AI platform today.