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of the organisation and helps traditional cost centres act more like revenue retention or activation centres. From the individual end user perspective, any time one can automate what has traditionally been a manually intensive process, the more that individual can turn to value generating activities.”
Doris adds: “The business benefits through cost saving and quality homogenisation; in theory the client benefits via reduced costs, faster and more accurate responses. However, many automation initiatives leave clients dealing with rigid systems that make exception handling almost impossible, so this is a potential downside as more of the service provision becomes fully automated.”
Rise of the machines
You can’t have a discussion about the automation of existing manual processes without questions being raised when it comes to job losses. We can all see an automated future awaiting us, but is RPA the Armageddon many are predicting? “Looking throughout history, innovation and technology have always created more jobs in the long run (albeit disrupting job sectors in the short-term),” says Seagrave. “I see RPA and AI following suit and I envisage new roles being created, in addition to freeing up resources to focus on higher value and more creative activities.”
Mann adds: “A symbiotic relationship exists between RPA and the human. RPA is being applied to more mundane and mass volume efforts, with oversight by the teams that formerly were responsible for that business process. Humans, in turn, redirect such technology to advance the process toward its logical conclusion or they themselves are the ‘last mile of copper’ in the business process.”
Karl Seagrave: “Automating ‘swivel-chair’ activities across disconnected applications (e.g. legacy applications) such as downstream integrations with core banking systems.”
Tom Doris: “Automation of clerical tasks, areas traditionally viewed as back office or lower skill deterministic tasks.”
That’s not to say the implementation of automated systems might create friction. Mann suggests that business teams could feel threatened by solutions that mitigate or eliminate errors they produced in the past – potentially pointing out deficiencies or incompetency. Perhaps a hybrid model could be a workable solution? Seagrave thinks a hybrid model could emerge, with machine learning “tapping into human expertise through supervised learning”. In this scenario, “the bots become the makers and the humans become the checkers”.
“No one can predict the future. But if we look back on previous industrial revolutions, it’s fair to say that a hybrid model has always emerged,” says Lengua Jr. “Some jobs have indeed been eliminated or fundamentally changed due to new technology throughout history, but humans have always invented new work. For example, a much larger share of traders today are skilled technologists, and even programmers in some cases.”
Mann concludes that IT teams “need to partner with the business to apply the needed budget and resources to advance an automation initiative, rather than trying to stifle it for self-preservation purposes”. Perhaps at the end of it all, it’s down to the humans, not the robots, as to how effective and well-integrated RPA can truly become.
RPA sets up machine learning and AI to deliver business value in the shape of unique insights that provide competitive advantage to the firm Steve Mann, CMO, Arachnys
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www.ibsintelligence.com | © IBS Intelligence 2018
IN WHAT AREAS DOES RPA HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO HAVE THE BIGGEST IMPACT?
Steve Mann: “Firms that have limited capital to apply toward technology or burdened with regulatory complexity have looked to RPA and the cloud to build more scalable, cheaper and safer infrastructures.”
Carmine Lengua Jr: “Trade automation is one such area that has been on the forefront of the application of AI and RPA in financial services.”
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