Understanding Robotic Process Automation & Artificial Intelligence

Many organizations, in their digital journey, often wonder which track to choose, Robotic Process Automation or Artificial Intelligence? To answer that question, we need to understand what is Robotic Process Automation and what is Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence makes our computers understand contexts such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages just like humans. Robotic Process automation, on the other hand, is a software to handle high-volume, repeatable tasks that previously required humans to perform. Artificial Intelligence interprets human language and vision and represents large sets of data into meaningful information. In short, it understands humans and augments their intelligence by providing insights into a large set of information. It answers, “What is the problem and what you need to do?”For example, Artificial Intelligence can extract invoice information from any document regardless of the design of the invoice and file types like PDF, Image, and Plain text, etc.

Robotic Process Automation emulates human actions in computers. For example, getting data from an excel file and submitting online forms. While it performs this action, it performs the activity in the same way that a human would perform. It will open a web browser, browse through pages to enter the data in the text boxes, choose options from drop-down lists and keeps performing until it reaches the submission page and clicks the submit button. Thus, it is extremely suitable for repetitive tasks. “Once you tell Robotic Process Automation what needs to be done, train the bot, it performs the action repeatedly again and again”. A practical example is that you have an excel file where all invoice information is present and Robotic Process Automation uploads the invoice information into your organization’s finance portal. Until recently, these two technologies were working independently and showed promising benefits to the users. In the previous example of extraction and updating invoice information in Finance portal, if we combine these two technologies, the benefits are immense. The entire process would be automated as below:

Artificial Intelligence tells you what you need to do and Robotic Process Automation does the task that you need to do. They partner well and the industry agrees to it. Recently there is a surge in increasing integrating Robotic Process Automation and artificial intelligence. For example, Uipath has launched Computer Vision, Templateless Receipt and Invoice Extraction as a part of their suite. We believe the topic of this Blog is not Robotic Process Automation vs Artificial Intelligence. It is ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION + ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, and once that is done the opportunities of automation using Artificial Intelligence is limitless.