Human endeavor has always been to make life easier, faster and
convenient with improved productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness towards
the broader goal of solving our problems and fulfilling our needs or
objectives. In the last two centuries,
this endeavor has reached new peaks at exponential speeds. Take for example the
case of automobiles. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, our
ancestors heavily relied on animal-drawn carriages for land-based conveyance
and transportation. These conditions underwent a dramatic change when the early
forms of engine-based vehicles started to appear and became increasingly
popular. Why these became so popular? Because these engine-based vehicles were
faster, could carry more load, travel longer distances and its controls were
easier and predictable.And after two hundred years since cars and trains first appeared
on the face of this world, here we are today, bracing to enter into the age of
self-driving cars.
Automation is not a new phenomenon. We humans have always had this
tendency to get more and more things done by the machines and specifically
those things which the machines could do better than us.This is what drives the
cause of automation. We could see this in the example cited above. In this
article,we’ll discuss the evolution and growing dominance of Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
By the first quarter of the 20th
century, workflow automation had begun to find its place in various industrial
and manufacturing units. Workflow automation refers to replacement or reduction
or simplification of manual and paper-based processes with digital and
automated solutions.It had a significant impact on productivity, efficiency and
effectiveness of the manufacturing units and its applications eventually spread
to other business processes which were about to get increasingly relied on
computers in the decades to be followed.
Towards the fall of the 20th
century, businesses began to face the issue of incompatibility between the conventional
legacy systems and the evolving software tools and applications. This gave rise
to the use of screen scraping software to bridge the gap between the old and
the new.However, it still suffered from many existing and evolving limitations.
The evolution of RPA has its
roots in artificial intelligence as well. Although the idea of Artificial Intelligence
(AI) has been in existence for more than 60 years now, it is only in the last
decade or so that it has started to gain a lot of attention and momentum. AI is
the idea to empower machines and computer systems to exhibit human-like
intelligence and judgmental abilities with the ultimate motive of automation.
With the cumulative effect of all
these developments which has contributed to the scope and scale of the
contemporary automation technology, what we have today are the software robots
that are capable of mimicking human actions in the execution of various routine
and repetitive operational activities by working on various computer-based business
information and communication systems. Automating business processes through the
use of software robots is the core idea behind Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Various industries and business processes where RPA is used include banking,
insurance, customer service, data entry, communication management, report
management etc.
To read more about Robotic Process
Automation, click here - What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Artificial Intelligence
The idea of machine intelligence
can be traced back to mythologies. And since then this figment of human
imagination has kept on surfacing again and again at different ages in one form
or the other.
However, in the year 1950, it was
Alan Turing who pioneered to figure out if machines could exhibit human-like or
equivalent intelligence. Alan Mathison Turing was a British scientist,
mathematician, crypt analyst and a pioneer of computer science who is also reckoned for
his feat of breaking into ‘The Enigma Code’ during the Second World War.
The term ‘artificial
intelligence’ was first coined by Dr. John McCarthy at the Dartmouth Conference
of 1956. Since then some of the most significant introductions and developments
made in the field of AI include natural language processing, robotics, neural
network, logic and symbolic reasoning, expert systems, use of algorithms,
brute-force computing, intelligent agents, data mining, search engines, speech
recognition, machine learning, deep learning, cognition, Big Data and artificial
general intelligence.Reaching here took us five to six decades. However, in the
last 10 years or so,AI has again started to make a buzz in today’s closely
intertwined worlds of business and technology.
Input Sources: (1), (2), (3), (4)
The business case: Robotic
Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence
The fundamental difference
between RPA and AI is that the former is only a software tool or a software
program for automating a certain category of routine and repetitive operational
activities which are otherwise executed by human employees in a business
enterprise while AI is a broader concept of designing and developing machines
and software programs for automation(systems approach), self-learning and most
importantly, with the ability to deal with input and output of diverse nature
from varied sources. Both RPA and AI can exist independent of one another. However,
AI can be applied on RPA. Combined together,these two can form a powerful tool
for automation for business enterprises. Some of the advanced applications of
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and AI in different business processes and verticals are depicted in the
following diagram.
Diagram 1 - Few applications of RPA and AI
With the exponential speed at which Artificial Intelligence is
developing,backed up with the keenness shown by the big players like Google,
Facebook, Amazon, Tesla and even lesser known but high-potential entities like
ADDO-AI (farming), ELSA (linguistics), Scry (prediction engine) and Sig Tuple
(healthcare)for research& developmental activities in the field of AI
applications, it may not be very hard to fathom that AI is on its way to redefining
how we make use of machines by making them more and more intelligent.
Input Sources: (5)
Disclaimer: The above
content/publication is intended only to provide a general overview and is not
to be used as a basis for the exercise of any business or professional judgment.
Input Sources
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_artificial_intelligence
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
(5) https://www.forbes.com/sites/chynes/2017/08/31/four-companies-using-ai-to-transform-the-world/#7620d4b84038
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
(5) https://www.forbes.com/sites/chynes/2017/08/31/four-companies-using-ai-to-transform-the-world/#7620d4b84038