Automation technology can be described in four phases, including Autonomous RPA. What is autonomous RPA? Along with it are three more phases of continuous innovation. Namely, assisted RPA, unassisted RPA, and cognitive RPA.
Robotic Process Automation Evolution
Nothing in this world is constant, but ‘Change’. You may have heard such a famous saying related to life.
In a sense, the same goes for the world of Robotic Process Automation or RPA. This is continually going through enormous transformations. As time and technology evolve into more advancement.
Advancement in technology is one of the reasons for this. This includes the following:
- Text analytics
- AI or Artificial Intelligence
- Natural language processing
- Machine Learning
- Digitization
Moreover, we can never be sure that these are to be steady. These are all still subject to change. But, in today’s era, let’s see the four phases of RPA Evolution.
RPA 1.0 – Assisted RPA
This is when RPA software automates different tasks. Also, this includes the automation of applications on a user’s device.
For instance of an Assisted RPA, is the simple copy-paste task. This could be from one screen to another. However, from the term itself ‘assisted’, this type of automation is only possible with real-time assistance by humans. Thus, this is a human to system interaction.
Assisted RPA benefits the following:
- Reducing average handling times
- Better customer experience
- Cost-efficient
- Complex tasks are now made easier. That is because these tasks can be replaced with a single mouse click.
- Thus, this is time-efficient.
RPA 2.0 – Unassisted RPA
‘Unassisted’ this proves to be. Unlike the RPA 1.0, automation can take place even without human assistance.
That means, no need to trigger machines, login, and set processes. These repetitive tasks can then be automated. Also, these are put simply with the help of dashboards.
Unassisted RPA Dashboards:
- Can assign tasks to machines
- Set priorities of tasks accordingly
- Set forth queues
- With the option of intervening in the robot when necessary
This is great and cool. Because robots can work all day long without tiring out. Thus, business processes run even when you sleep.
Autonomous RPA
You get the best of both worlds with this. What is Autonomous RPA? It combines the technology of AI, machine learning, cognitive automation, computer vision, and more.
It can:
- Connect to databases and retrieve information
- Apply control rules
- Produce new data
- And then inject these data using programming
Thus, this further generates better efficiency in business processes. However, in case these falls short, a robot supervisor can test why. He will see the reasons behind it. Then he will take steps to correct, and restart the robots for work resume.
Autonomous RPA is the current ‘latest’ version of RPA.
Cognitive RPA
This is currently in the making. With cognitive RPA, decision-making can be done by robots. This includes long and complex tasks.
Cognitive RPA uses the following technology approaches:
- Natural language processing
- Data mining
- Semantic technology
- Machine learning
- Text analytics
This makes sure that both structured and unstructured data are best utilized. Moreover, it seamlessly analyzes unstructured data.