Industry analysts Gartner predicts that the global Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market will grow to $1.89 billion by next year. This huge growth illustrates the vast appetite for automation within enterprises, however up until now many organisations have struggled to scale their RPA projects beyond proof of concepts or individual use cases.
Problems with Scaling
One of the reasons RPA and more broadly, Intelligent Automation projects struggle to scale is that typically they are led by Centre of Excellence (CoE) or IT teams. Individuals in these teams have high levels of technical and automation knowledge and in-depth involvement in projects from the offset. The difficulties in scale and wider adoption across a business therefore occur when deployments are handed over to functional teams.
Teams such as HR, Sales and customer service are experts in their fields, but have limited IT and technical knowledge.
Put simply, there is not a common language between IT and other areas of the business. Consequently, when the project is handed over, considerable time and effort is needed to train individuals, resulting in delays, low levels of adoption and benefits not being released as quickly as anticipated leading to misaligned expectations.
Combining RPA & Conversational Assistants
Through combining Conversational AI Assistants with RPA, non-technical teams, such as HR, can quickly and easily manage projects within a language they understand – significantly improving adoption and scale across the business.
Create a Shared Language
For example, Conversational Assistants can be accessed by functional teams to trigger or update RPA processes, on demand, 24/7 without the need for accessing back end systems or configuring workflows. This means that teams can manage bots themselves, reducing the reliance on CoE and IT, minimising potential delays in issue resolution and crucially provides functional teams with more direct influence over outcomes delivered by the project.
Discovery Tools
CoE teams can also use Conversational AI Assistants to increase adoption of RPA by deploying them as a discovery tool for functional teams. The assistant enables employees to ask questions and find out more information about the project, whenever they need it and in their preferred communication channel. Deploying a Conversational Assistant in this way increases user awareness and understanding of RPA, improving adoption, and removing ‘new technology’ fear through giving them direct experience of the platform.
End-to-End Process Automation
Additionally, Conversational Assistants can help RPA projects to scale through extending automation benefits to end-to-end processes. Platforms, such as Humley’s Conversational Assistant, enable organisations to streamline the handling of real time employee, customer and supplier communications and requests through deploying Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Collaborating with RPA bots to trigger relevant actions to fulfil those requests.
For example, the solution enables organisation to guide customers or employees through a series of questions in order to complete forms or make travel bookings – converting the unstructured human conversation into structured machine-readable data for upload into business systems by RPA bots and triggering further actions such as automated emails. By applying Conversational AI and RPA in this way, organisations can achieve transformational efficiencies and a more persuasive business case for wider adoption across their business.
In Conclusion ...
Through combining Conversational AI with RPA organisations can deliver true digital transformation and scale, through enabling everyone within the business to understand and access the technology. In doing so businesses can reap the benefits of automation much more effectively and quickly helping to ensure growth and success.
To find out more about how you can enhance your RPA deployment with a Conversational AI Assistant, get in touch today.