What Is Cognitive Automation? A Primer

Cognitive automation tools such as employee onboarding bots can help by taking care of many required tasks in a fast, efficient, predictable and error-free manner. Back office clerical processes outsourced by large organisations – particularly those sent offshore – tend to be simple and transactional in nature, requiring little (if any) analysis or subjective judgement. This would seem to make an ideal starting point for organizations beginning to adopt robotic automation for the back office. As a form of automation, the concept has been around for a long time in the form of screen scraping, which can be traced back to early forms of malware[ambiguous]. Oftentimes, RPA is considered the simplest form of Artificial Intelligence and is therefore used in business practices that require little skill. Many organizations have also successfully automated their KYC processes with RPA.

Only the simplest tools, initially built in 2000s before the explosion of interest in RPA are in this bucket. RPA is the right solution if your process involves structured, large amounts of data and is strictly rule-based. In the case of Data Processing the differentiation is simple in between these two techniques. RPA works on semi-structured or structured data, but Cognitive Automation can work with unstructured data.

What Are the Benefits of Cognitive Automation?

IBM Consulting’s extreme automation consulting services enable enterprises to move beyond simple task automations to handling high-profile, customer-facing and revenue-producing processes with built-in adoption and scale. He focuses on cognitive automation, artificial intelligence, RPA, and mobility. The above-mentioned examples are just some common ways of how enterprises can leverage a cognitive automation solution. It is up to the enterprise now to incorporate it and use it the way it deems fit. In the retail sector, a cognitive automation solution can ensure all the store systems – physical or online – are working correctly. Thus, the customer does not face any issues with browsing and purchasing the item they like.

“One of the biggest challenges for organizations that have embarked on automation initiatives and want to expand their automation and digitalization footprint is knowing what their processes are,” Kohli said. Employee onboarding is another example of a complex, multistep, manual process that requires a lot of HR bandwidth and can be streamlined with cognitive automation. Processors must retype the text or use standalone optical character recognition tools to copy and paste information from a PDF file into the system for further processing. Cognitive automation uses technologies like OCR to enable automation so the processor can supervise and take decisions based on extracted and persisted information. Manual duties can be more than onerous in the telecom industry, where the user base numbers millions. A cognitive automated system can immediately access the customer’s queries and offer a resolution based on the customer’s inputs.

From Data-Driven Insights to Heartfelt Connections: Crafting Personalized Messages that Captivate

However, RPA can only handle repetitive works and interact with a software application or website. Data mining and NLP techniques are used to extract policy data and impacts of policy changes to make automated decisions regarding policy changes. While chatbots are gaining popularity, their impact is limited by how deeply integrated they are into your company’s systems. For example, if they are not integrated into the legacy billing system, a customer will not be able to change her billing period through the chatbot.

• Splunk’s dashboards enable businesses to keep tabs on the condition of their equipment and keep an eye on distant warehouses.
• Whether it’s automating customer service inquiries, analyzing large datasets, or streamlining accounting processes, cognitive automation is enabling businesses to operate more efficiently and effectively than ever before.
• Cognitive Automation relies on knowledge and intends to mimic human behaviors and actions.
• After realizing quick wins with rule-based RPA and building momentum, the scope of automation possibilities can be broadened by introducing cognitive technologies.
• Today’s modern-day manufacturing involves a lot of automation in its processes to ensure large scale production of goods.

Cognitive automation can help care providers better understand, predict, and impact the health of their patients. Your automation could use OCR technology and machine learning to process handling of invoices that used to take a long time to deal with manually. Machine learning helps the robot become more accurate and learn from exceptions and mistakes, until only a tiny fraction require human intervention. Due to such limitations, end to end automation becomes difficult as human intervention becomes the bottleneck.

Typically, organizations have the most success with cognitive automation when they start with rule-based RPA first. After realizing quick wins with rule-based RPA and building momentum, the scope of automation possibilities can be broadened by introducing cognitive technologies. What’s important, rule-based RPA helps with process standardization, which is often critical to the integration of AI in the workplace and in the corporate workflow.

The popularity of cognitive automation is growing rapidly, with IDC stating that cognitive spending was the largest area of AI spending back in 2017 and that remains the case today. According to IDC’s forecast, cognitive and AI spending will grow to $52.2 billion in 2021, with a large chunk of it going to cognitive applications. Cognitive computing is not a machine learning method; but cognitive systems often make use of a variety of machine-learning techniques. Inventory control checks a company’s inventory levels in its warehouse and the goods spread over other locations. Traditionally managing inventory can be a daunting task, as it requires extensive manual efforts like generating work orders, creating invoices, tracking inventory, and handling shipping and fulfilment.

Cognitive Automation: Evolving the Workplace

Upon claim submission, a bot can pull all the relevant information from medical records, police reports, ID documents, while also being able to analyze the extracted information. Then, the bot can automatically classify claims, issue payments, or route them to a human employee for further analysis. This way, agents can dedicate their time to higher-value activities, with processing times dramatically decreased and customer experience enhanced. Cognitive automation is an umbrella term for software solutions that leverage cognitive technologies to emulate human intelligence to perform specific tasks. One example of cognitive automation in action is in the healthcare industry. Hospitals and clinics are using cognitive automation tools to automate administrative tasks such as appointment scheduling, billing, and patient record keeping.

If cognitive intelligence is fed with unstructured data, the system finds the relationships and similarities between the items by learning from the association. Alternatively, cognitive intelligence thinks and behaves like humans, which is more complex than the repetitive actions mimicked by RPA automation. Cognitive intelligence can handle tasks the way a human will by analyzing situations the way a human would.

These efforts have yielded significant accomplishments, solidifying my role as a valuable asset in this field. From the above 2 examples, it’s easy to observe that the biggest benefit of RPA is savings in time and cost on repetitive tasks otherwise performed by human. Itransition offers full-cycle AI development to craft custom process automation, cognitive assistants, personalization and predictive analytics solutions. If you wish to introduce intelligent automation into your business, we can help you pave the way toward your business’s digital transformation.

Users can also create bots using RPA automation by observing human digital actions. Robotic Process Automation software bots can also interact with any application or system. RPA bots can also work around the clock, nonstop, much faster, and with 100% accuracy and precision. As these tools and technologies advance, more complex processes can be tackled—but also simple, routine tasks that previously lacked the volume or dollar impact to be justifiable.

Intending to enhance Bookmyshow‘s client interactions, Splunk has provided them with a cognitive automation solution. Due to the extensive use of machinery at Tata Steel, problems frequently cropped up. Digitate‘s ignio, a cognitive automation technology, helps with the little hiccups to keep the system functioning.

To execute business processes across the organization, RPA bots also provide a scheduling feature. These tasks can be handled by using simple programming capabilities and do not require any intelligence. Cognitive automation combined with RPA’s qualities imports an extra mile of composure; contextual adaptation. Cognitive Automation simulates the human learning procedure to grasp knowledge from the dataset and extort the patterns. It can use all the data sources such as images, video, audio and text for decision making and business intelligence, and this quality makes it independent from the nature of the data. Intelligent bots can be integrated with sensors and IoT devices connected to machinery.

These processes need to be taken care of in runtime for a company that manufactures airplanes like Airbus since they are significantly more crucial. All the apps are very handy as we have the best customer success consultants working together with our Sales Director. “Cognitive RPA is adept at handling exceptions without human intervention. A human traditionally had to make the decision or cognitive automation examples execute the request, but now the software is mimicking the human decision-making activity.”- Jon Knisley. However, in the long run, Cognitive intelligence produces the most effective for organizations than RPAs. RPA and Cognitive intelligence are automation that increase your productivity in the short and long run. With predictive analytics, bots are enabled to make situational decisions.

Make your business operations a competitive advantage by automating cross-enterprise and expert work. In the telecom sector, where the userbase is in millions, manual tasks can be more than overwhelming. Cognitive automation brings in an extra layer of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to the mix. This provides thinking and decision-making capabilities to the automation solution. Sign up on our website to receive the most recent technology trends directly in your email inbox.

More sophisticated cognitive automation that automates decision processes requires more planning, customization and ongoing iteration to see the best results. If your organization wants a lasting, adaptable cognitive automation solution, then you need a robust and intelligent digital workforce. That means your digital workforce needs to collaborate with your people, comply with industry standards and governance, and improve workflow efficiency. It mimics human behavior and intelligence to facilitate decision-making, combining the cognitive ‘thinking’ aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) with the ‘doing’ task functions of robotic process automation (RPA). For example, a cognitive intelligence system can use AI capabilities like OCR to read documents by capturing text from documents and using natural language processing to understand the users, like biodata, invoice items, and terms. The system further organizes them into appropriate fields in a procurement and payment workflow.

• Since cognitive automation can analyze complex data from various sources, it helps optimize processes.
• For instance, Religare, a well-known health insurance provider, automated its customer service using a chatbot powered by NLP and saved over 80% of its FTEs.
• You can also learn about other innovations in RPA such as no code RPA from our future of RPA article.
• Essentially, cognitive automation within RPA setups allows companies to widen the array of automation scenarios to handle unstructured data, analyze context, and make non-binary decisions.

Get in touch with us, and let’s explore the possibilities of transforming your Organization. Intelligent automation is a powerful technology that can empower businesses to stay ahead of the competition. Fortunately, the day isn’t far when this technology will disrupt the current business environment and will be seen extensively used for numerous industrial applications. For any organization, the employee onboarding and off-boarding process is often a tedious task that requires tremendous amounts of time, effort and resources. At the time of onboarding, the primary necessity is the training, paperwork and task delegation process.