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As a business leader, you’ve had to rapidly adapt your business to meet the changing needs of your people, customers and operations during this pandemic. But as the pace of change isn't going to let up anytime soon, and with every business unit, every location and every person affected in their own unique way, keeping up is daunting to think about.
We’re here to show you how we can help. Whether you are still considering different types of automation, or already have a digital workforce, in this article we’ll show you how that process you might have deemed unsuitable for automation may, in fact, be suitable with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
What AI components exist in Blue Prism today?
Whatever deployment approach you take, we’ve created an ecosystem that gives you the ability to expand your digital workers' capabilities. By working with our partner network and using our internal expertise, there’s a whole host of AI themes available in Blue Prism today or accessible through the DX that are ready for enterprise use.
For ease of understanding what works best for your business, we’ve divided these skills up into 6 areas that cover the demands we see businesses like your face every day when deploying automation. What’s more, as all these pieces come from partners or using internal development — you can trust these technologies to deliver value.
Let’s look at the 6 segments of AI available for Blue Prism digital workers which allow them to take on advanced tasks:
- Problem Solving — The ability to solve logic, business and system problems autonomously
- Learning – The ability to adapt to evolving process patterns & derive contextual meaning
- Collaboration — The ability to work seamlessly alongside people and systems
- Visual Perception — The ability to read, understand and contextualize visual information
- Planning & Sequencing — The ability to optimize workloads and discover opportunities for better outcomes
- Knowledge & insight – The ability to harvest, understand and deliver insight from disparate data sources
So, what does this mean for your business? What can it help you achieve? And most importantly, why is it relevant to you?
How can it benefit your business?
AI is now intertwined into every aspect of people’s lives. But while it’s easy to explain why you use a voice communication AI on your phone or home speakers, applications for process and tasks using digital workers is not always so clear.
A simple way to imagine the possibilities of AI is to picture a digital worker as your co-worker. If you think about the skills your human colleagues have, wouldn’t it be ideal if you could replicate some of those skills in digital workers? Skills such as the ability to understand conversational language, respond to requests, work with almost any documentation and improve based on experience.
We thought so, which is why we built out these AI skills to help you automate further, faster. Sure, most people start off with high volume and low complexity tasks, but thanks to technology now available for digital workers there many areas that now can be addressed.
Let’s take a look at some examples of processes that can be automated today using AI.
Accounts payable/receivable using intelligent document processing (IDP)
Invoices, purchase orders and other accounts-based documentation comes in multiple formats — both structured and semi-structured. For a digital worker to work on processes in this area requires the ability to both identify the relevant data and extract it. With IDP, this process can be easily addressed by applying OCR with machine learning to recognize, classify and extract data. And, if the digital worker is unsure, they simply flag it for assistance and learn from the outcome. This makes the possibilities of new processes involving ever more complex documentation possible.
Email triage using Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
Info, support or enquiries inboxes are an easy way for businesses to stay in contact with their customers from a central point. However, what’s not so easy is organizing these inboxes with multiple queries on different topics mixed together. Typically, people are used to organizing these often-confusing shared inboxes manually, spending an inordinate amount of time sorting and reading multiple messages. By using digital workers on these tasks, you can use their ability to read through emails using NLU to analyze the content and context of a message against a set number of scenarios. Once these are sorted, digital workers can either respond or flag the message to a person to handle. As you might imagine, this can save a significant amount of your staff team so they can focus on tasks that require their abilities.
Chatbots to support customer services
If you think about lots of the requests that come into your contact centers, many of the requests will be simple scenarios — such as a change of address or some other small account detail. By using digital workers with chat function alongside your human workforce, you can quickly cut down the number of calls coming into your business and free up your people to handle the requests that require uniquely human skills. A win-win situation for your business and your customers.
If you’d like to learn more about the ability of AI to help you automate @speed, watch our on-demand webinar with CTO, Danny Major, here