Artificial Intelligence and automation are touted as the 4th industrial revolution after the steam engine, electricity and mechanized automation. Let’s have a look at how artificial intelligence and automation are leading a new industrial age.
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| Robotic process automation (RPA) is the future of technology |
How Artificial Intelligence And Automation Are Leading A New Industrial Age
To label a phenomenon a revolution, it should have a wide-scale impact on almost everything. That is precisely what automation and Artificial Intelligence are slowly but surely achieving in every walk of life. Automation and Artificial Intelligence are touted as the 4th industrial revolution after the steam engine, electricity and mechanized automation.
The steady and gradual introduction of technology into IT services and IT enabled services has taken the shape of Robotic Process Automation. IT will further evolve into AI based systems that are intelligent enough to identify what is happening and take appropriate corrective actions. Automation, both in the mechanized and software services industry and Artificial Intelligence, is leading the new industrial age, an industrial revolution, Industry 4.0.
Let’s look at how artificial intelligence and automation have written success stories and continue to bring in holistic improvements in how business is carried out and how they positively impact businesses' bottom line.
What is Automation?
Automation is identifying simple repetitive tasks in everyday operations and having a robot run these tasks for you. These tasks are run accurately and take a short time to execute, allowing the human workforce to focus on much more complex cognitive tasks. A great example of automation is the car assembly line, where robots are installed to carry out all fitting tasks on the assembly line. You may note that the assembly line itself was a primitive example of automation.
Robotic Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation is the process of identifying tasks on a computer system that are part of a business process. An example of a business process is Order to Cash, which involves a series of steps through a software application, and these are repeated day in and day out. A robotic process automation bot records these activities and carries them out for the staff executing the tasks making it much easier, time-efficient and error-free.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is the ability of an artificial machine to learn from data and make the right decision given a similar situation in the future. In some ways, a machine's decision is based on facts stored in memory just like a human brain.
Let’s look at how Automation, Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence are leading the industrial age. This is even referred to as the 4th industrial revolution.
Automation and RPA have some apparent advantages that businesses can choose to ignore only at their own risk.
Cost Savings
Robotic Process Automation is synonymous with cost savings. How? It is doing the job or task of a human resource and doing it way quicker, which means fewer human resources employed for mundane and repetitive tasks. With RPA, the possibility of human errors is drastically reduced, thereby also reducing the cost of any potential errors.
Quality, Accurate Work
RPA will do the job exactly as it has been designed to execute, with no deviations and in almost less than half the time a human would take. With absolutely no deviations comes the advantage of accuracy and elimination of errors.
Enhanced Cycle Time
The time that RPA takes to perform a task is way lesser than its human counterpart. With less time taken, you get more productivity. You could even explore possibilities of assigning non-mundane complex tasks to the human counterpart.
Employee Empowerment
Easy deployment of RPA means lesser dependence on IT, which in turn improves cycle time. With freed up time, the IT resources can focus on more important tasks and critical projects.
Simplicity and Flexibility
RPA is simple and flexible. Meaning any changes to the process can be quickly incorporated into the robot with no need for coding or scriptwriting.
Better Control
With RPA, you get to control the process much better than traditional process control methods. You could even reverse any outsourcing and handle the process in-house without worrying about any spiralling costs.
Insights and Analytics
The incredible thing about RPA is that it can record every move executed by it. These are then translated into reports and data for further analytics.
With those advantages at a reasonable cost, ROI starting to show up almost immediately is an enticing prospect for any business.
This leads to an industrial revolution of sorts with a lot of churns in processes to accommodate automation.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence
From what you have known about Artificial Intelligence and automation, you might have guessed that Artificial Intelligence is not a tool to reverse your revenue fortunes overnight. It is a more mature and complicated process that brings about a holistic systemic transformation into the business.
Here are some of the well-known advantages of Artificial Intelligence-
Automation
Like RPA, AI-powered applications can achieve automation in learning from prevailing situations and take the best possible decision in the business's interest.
Unlike RPA, AI not only improves productivity but also finds new ways to perform tasks you might not have looked into yet.
Smart Decision Making
AI is known for smarter decision making. How? Well, it can sift through millions of data items in a fraction of the time that even a group of the most intelligent humans can go through and uncover relationships and patterns that help the business stand out in the market. What is different in AI is that it can predict critical events with reasonable accuracy?
Enhanced Customer Experience
AI-powered applications are equipped to predict failures, thereby allowing businesses enough time to prepare well for customer engagement exercises. AI-powered chatbots with the power of Natural Language Processing can interact with customers just as a human employee would. Chatbots today can resolve queries from customers that range from simple to medium complexity. With time this will change as by that time the machines would have learned how to deal with complex issues.
AI-powered customer engagement
AI-powered applications are getting better at interacting with customers, and industries like banking and healthcare, which traditionally involved multiple touchpoints with humans, are being transformed. AI-powered bots are now the front line in many cases, and human intervention is needed when either the customer needs it or when the machine has not been designed to handle the problem at hand.
AI powered Research
Machine Learning and Deep Learning-based AI solutions are playing an important role in research. The AI algorithms can reduce the time required for research and development, thus reducing the time to market new products.
Both Artificial Intelligence and automation (or RPA) have made significant inroads in various industries and staging small but extensive changes that offer advantages that have been discussed above. AI and automation impact the workforce and what human resources will be expected of from businesses. They will bring about significant changes in the way human resources are engaged for running businesses efficiently. This is nothing like the industrial revolution.
Conclusion
You could look at RPA or mechanized automation as an investment that gives you instant returns. Artificial Intelligence, in some sense, won't start showing an upward swing in ROI immediately. It will take some time before the machines can learn massive data sets and algorithms tweaked for your business-specific requirements. Artificial Intelligence has the potential to earn you a more significant ROI if you are willing to wait long enough. If you want to learn from scratch then you can enroll in an Introduction to artificial intelligence course for free to gain knowledge about this technology. There are various AI Certificate Programs that you can utilize to learn about AI in depth.