Pascal Bornet is a pioneer and expert in the field of intelligent automation often referred to as hyperautomation or cognitive. He was a guest speaker at the World Economic Forum about the technology and his enthusiasm to make our world more human by utilizing intelligent automation.
A rewritten transcript of that conversation is provided below.
Is intelligent automation?
Intelligent automation is the mix of strategies that involves individuals, companies and machines that use machine learning. Intelligent automation is designed to automating business processes from beginning to end through computers. It provides business results for employees who work in tandem with them to provide quicker, more efficient, and less expensive services. This not only improves the customer experience for employees but also the experience for customers.
If I want to explain the meaning of intelligent automation I would like to provide an illustration. Every business in the globe are engaged in an end-to-end procedure known as ‘procure-topay’ (PTP), which involves acquiring items and services from suppliers. Intelligent automation can help in the beginning to identify the best vendors through machine learning. It’s then about making orders available to these vendors, and how we make use of workflow platforms, as an instance.
Then it’s time to receive and processing invoices following the goods or services were received. this is possible using natural processing of languages. Finally, it’s time to pay to the vendors. It’s a very systematic process and is possible to do it by using automated process automation.
What can intelligent automation do to help customers and employees?
It helps employees do work more efficiently, faster as well as having more time to concentrate on the things that really matter. For instance insights or comments, relationships, and managing their teams since intelligent automation works to assist them in the most routine and transactional tasks. We say, “I do not have time for that, because I have to complete all of this’. Today, we have more time to do quality work.
The experience of employees is crucial however, so is the experience for customers. In a line to purchase an train ticket, or waiting in line to visit an agent from the bank and so on, can all be solved through automated systems that are intelligent. Over 90% of customers do not bother to complain and 90% of them never come back. This is why it’s an impossible task to determine the factors that make a customer happy and how to earn their loyalty . Intelligent automation is at the heart of all this.
How might intelligent automation help in healthcare?
Based on our estimates, intelligent automation could be able to save 10 million lives each year. It could accomplish this by helping aid in clinical trials, diagnosis of diseases and preventing medical errors.
In countries that are developing it could help decrease deaths due to preventable causes in addition. There are more than 1.6 million individuals die each year due to diseases that are that are caused by diarrhoea, as an instance. It’s a bit crazy since we know how to fix the issue. The problem is that people aren’t able to access doctors. Globally, there’s an acute shortage of over four million doctors. With remote diagnosis using tablets and smartphones, these patients can access the medical services. In this case are thousands of lives which could be saved each year.
Another example I’d like to mention is an application for intelligent automation such as tissue analytics that helps to quickly identify chronic burns, wounds or skin problems by taking a photo on smartphones.
How about transport?
It’s an excellent use case for transportation. This involves the identification as well as the forecast of the location where transportation is required, to ensure that you put the right resources and the correct trucks to the correct location ahead of the requirement being articulated. This can be accomplished with machine learning using the past and historical data, and finally the optimizing of the route trucks travel.
In Melbourne the city, they’ve provided drones with the capability of recording the traffic on roundabouts in video to help them be able to recognize patterns and aid in designing more efficient traffic rules, a better flow of traffic, and other vehicles by using machine learning.
Can intelligent automation replace our jobs?
It’s all about synergy I would say that it is a combination of what people perform and plan to do and what machines can do and are expected to perform. Today, machines, aided by advanced technologies like robots that learn can complete every repetitive task that is transactional exceptionally effectively. However, they have to be taught based on large quantities of data, which means they need be repeated over the past numerous times.
However, machines aren’t good and will not be able to compete in any way for the next couple of decades in areas such as creative thinking, building relationships critical thinking, relationship building, or anything related to social capabilities. It’s all about us human beings focusing on the qualities that differentiate us from machines.
Let’s consider the case of a doctor who is helping to review images. Naturally, the machine is much more adept at diagnosing cancerous areas on X-rays quickly with high precision – far better than a physician. But, the doctor is the most effective in managing the relationship between patient and doctor by helping the patient know what’s going on and what’s in the future, and managing changes and communicating. This is how humans and machines work.
We make use of intelligent automation to control routine, transactional tasks. This helps people focus on more exciting tasks and also providing more value to their organizations.
What is the future bringing?
The acceptance for intelligent automation has been large. The term was first coined in 2017 but more than half the enterprises around the world have already adopted it. This will increase to 70 percent, according Deloitte within the next two years.
Yet just 15% have succeeded in scaling the transformations. Therefore, today’s primary issue for every company is scaling up the implementation of these technologies across divisions, as well as across different companies within the same company.
We’ve done some study on the most crucial success factors that will bring you to the scale needed. The first is to place people at the center of the transformations. They are carried out by people for individuals. The second one concerns the management support. The third one is about using different technologies in order to make it possible to automate the most difficult scenarios. Fourth fouris about using the latest technologies, commonly known as low-code technologies. They aid people with no programming capabilities, no programming experience in implementing intelligent automation into their daily work , and to improve their daily tasks by themselves.
The fifth crucial element of success is the use of new technologies that allow for intelligent automation. The truth is that digital transformations are highly manual, and extremely labor-intensive. However, by using technology like discovery, process and data discovery, automated machine learning, and many others can be used to automating the majority of the execution of intelligent automation to ensure that the transformations are quicker and have a greater impact.
