While I wasn’t familiar with the term “Robotic Process Automation,” it turns out both the concept and the technology have been around for several years. I stumbled upon the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) concept while researching a story about IPsoft’s newly announced intelligent assistant offering, Amelia.

IPsoft refers to Amelia as an artificial intelligence platform being piloted at early-adopter customer sites. I wasn’t able to give her a test run. But based on the company’s own descriptions, Amelia is designed as a conversational, customer service agent that can handle both simple questions as well as some transactional interactions.

Some more digging into IPsoft turned up an interview in The Economic Times with Chetan Dube, IPsoft founder and former New York University mathematics professor. The article brings up the term robotic process automation, or RPA. Blue Prism is mentioned as an example of another RPA solution provider.

Blue Prism offers tools for designing, building and deploying business process automations across a wide range of industries. In the Financial Sector, for example, their technology enables banks to automate core functions, such as processing Payment Protection Insurance claims. The process isn’t described in detail, but I can imagine that the automated “assistants” examine information in the claims to ensure their completeness and compliance with regulations and that they then make a preliminary judgment on the claim’s acceptability. Pre-screened claims are most likely forwarded to human agents for final validation.

IPsoft describes the capabilities of its Amelia product in terms reminiscent of other intelligent assistants on the ket. Amelia can respond to routine customer service requests, look up information on a corporate website or the web, and escalate calls to human agents when it doesn’t have an adequate response.

But IPsoft’s product portfolio includes autonomic processing technology, which is another way of saying RPA. Amelia, coupled with RPA, might be taught to execute business processes that go deeper than just handling customer service calls. What if Amelia could take a customer’s call and then go on to process the customer’s claim?

So what does RBA mean for intelligent assistants and virtual agents in the customer service world? Perhaps the two technologies are set to converge.

At Opus Research’s Intelligent Assistants Conference last month, the focus was on the ability of intelligent assistants to effectively assist customers while driving down costs or shifting costs to higher value tasks. Often this goal can be achieved by automating routine, but critically important, customer-facing processes.

Hyatt Hotels uses intelligent agent technology from Interactions to automate the front end of the call-based reservations process. No one referred to this solution as robotic process automation, but in the strictest sense, it fits the category. As virtual agent technologies become more capable, the line separating intelligent assistants from RBA solutions may continue to blur.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants Conference, Customer service, Intelligent agent, IPsoft