How RPA can be the First Step in Enabling Cognitive Automation for Enterprises

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) garners consistent attention from various businesses across sectors, as it promises efficiency, accuracy, and economy. It is a powerful technology that can allow organizations to ensure better customer services, faster operational turnaround, greater agility across departments, higher-cost savings, etc.

With advanced technologies like machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics becoming mainstream, the notion of automating cognitive tasks is also on the rise. There’s an increased focus on capturing repetitive process workflows and automating them. As it stands, RPA, which lays the foundation for increased agility and precision, also serves as the steppingstone to cognitive automation.

Unveiling the Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA is designed to perform mundane tasks reliably, quickly, and repeatedly compared to human workers. It is a proven technology organizations use across industries – be it finance, retail, manufacturing, insurance telecom, etc. It produces impactful results when combined with emerging technologies such as AI, Deep Learning, ML, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

Most importantly, RPA significantly impacts cost savings through error-free, reliable, and faster business process execution. It operates round-the-clock at almost a fraction of the cost of human resources and handles higher workload volumes. In addition, it improves reliability and quality in meeting compliance and regulatory requirements by eradicating human errors.

RPA also increases customer and employee satisfaction and lends time and space to full-time employees, which can pave the way for them to focus on more value-added services.

Taking the Big Step in RPA with Cognitive Automation

As organizations continue to streamline business processes, there’s a massive opportunity to take the next step and automate cognitive activities. The bid is to automate high-order tasks, which, in the past, needed human judgment and perceptual capabilities.

Cognitive automation is an extension of RPA technology and a step toward hyper-automation and intelligent automation. The process entails the automation of judgment or knowledge-based tasks or processes using AI. In essence, the role of cognitive automation is to add an AI layer to the RPA software to ensure RPA bots can carry out reasoning and knowledge-based tasks more efficiently. This improves operational efficiency, reduces error rate, and increases ROI.

Cognitive Automation Improves RPA

Using text analytics and natural language processing, it is possible to convert unstructured data into useful, structured data. After that, RPA can utilize this data for automated processes and decision-making.

Predictive analytics enables bots to make reasoning calls depending on the situation. In addition, machine learning, an important part of cognitive automation, allows systems to learn, develop capabilities, and improve various aspects of functionality for better results.

Overall, cognitive RPA is extremely powerful for unstructured data processing, such as emails and documents, and using the same to drive automation.

As such, cognitive automation proves to be a powerful tool for industries (like financial and banking services, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing) that have a lot of data to process, leaving enough room for performing higher value add activities.

Let’s take a closer look at the use cases of cognitive RPA.

Cognitive RPA Use Cases

RPA, powered by cognitive abilities, allows businesses to deliver customers an engaging and interactive instant-messaging session. It is almost as good as chatting with a human representative. Voice-enabled bots are used for telephonic conversations. Interactive voice response (IVR) is another notable example of RPA that improves customer experience.

Automated email conversations, AI-based automated suggestions, notifications, triggers, etc. and other such examples are all part of cognitive RPA.

With cognitive RPA, automated systems are empowered to understand customers’ intent, realize the unstructured data along with it, predict customers’ behaviour, and drive automated decision-making. Cognitive automation can also monitor the entire customer journey and engage with it more effectively.

For example, banking chatbots are designed to automate the new account opening process. A customer may ask the bot for a new account opening form online, fill out the state, and upload the necessary documents. The form can be submitted to the bot for preliminary processing like running credit score checks, scanning driver’s licenses, extracting ID card data, etc.

Such capabilities come to the fore across industries. Another use case involves cognitive automation helping healthcare providers to evaluate the diagnostic results speedily and offer insights into the most feasible treatment path. Likewise, technology takes the centre stage in driving loan processing initiatives or accelerating back-office processing in banking & financial services sector.

How Can Ellicium’s Cognitive Automation Services Help?

The RPA and cognitive automation market have shown enormous potential for businesses worldwide. As per a report from Forrester, the RPA software and services market is predicted to grow from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $22 billion by 2025.

At Ellicium, our profound understanding of AI, ML, and analytics gives us an advantage in helping enterprises get the RPA done right. We focus on bringing the best out of automation initiatives by simulating knowledge-based tasks on computer vision, speech and pattern recognition in line with your organization’s business objectives.

More importantly, with Ellicium’s cognitive automation services, businesses can experience reduced manual intervention, uninterrupted work, improved accuracy, optimum human resource utilization and system agnosticism. It also results in improved data quality, faster implementation, ease of use, greater productivity and higher ROI. Explore our services here.

Automating complex and time-intensive processes requires a structured approach to completing the task– opening a new bank account, closing an invoice, driving patient care, or facilitating legal documentation.

Hence, enterprises should partner with experts to develop an efficient RPA process and make well-informed decisions. Connect with us to learn more.