Where human and digital workers work side by side

RPA company Automation Anywhere held their flagship event Imagine India in Bengaluru some time back. Before the event, CEO & Co-Founder Mihir Shukla and CRO & Co-Founder Ankur Kothari talked to the media about the changes taking place in the fields of RPA, AI-ML and the role of bots or digital workers in the world economy. Some excerpts from the meet…

The US$10 trillion market.

Mihir: Let’s look at the work done across various office environments, not physical work. If you look at a slice of that work worldwide, about $10 trillion of work is associated with data collection and data processing. That 10 trillion will get automatic. It has to get automated, because it is automated. That is the largest software market in the world. It will go beyond 10 trillion. Things will get automatic and in return we will get quality, speed, efficiency, scale and reliability.

It's happening across virtually every country. 85% of the largest 50 banks and financial services are our customers, 80% of the largest telcos, 80% of the largest healthcare and the same in retail. It’s happening across every industry. It's a unique phenomenon. I think in my mind this is as large as the Internet or the smartphone industry where eventually everything will change because of it. Because every kind of work will change every kind of transaction will change. Technology has reached a point where bots can write press releases, earnings reports and even compose a few pieces of music, which a layman may not be able to tell is artificially created. So the technology is far ahead.

Ankur: If you look at Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, then one of the first rules of Abenomics is to automate. It is required for work-life balance because the stress levels are the highest amongst the developed nations.

Mihir: Take a factory in Japan, where it is fully automated. All the data goes to the Automation Anywhere software bots and these in turn drive the hardware robots. In manufacturing plants, IoT (Internet of Things) devices feed the data to software bots and human beings cannot process so much data. Only software bots can handle that kind of feedback.

Coming to India, we just need to accelerate. The way China created an expertise in manufacturing; India has the capability to create a Business Process Automation expertise. China does about 60% of the world's manufacturing. Similarly India can do 60% of all Business Process Automation. The way there was a faster adoption of mobile technologies; many countries don't have to spend billions of dollars on old IT infrastructure anymore. They can go straight to some of the AI algorithms and skip a previous generation.

The bot-human relationship.

Ankur: We have raised it to a different level where humans and bots can interact and work with each. It can work not just between one human and one bot, but teams of people connected to one bot or teams of people connected to multiple bots. It truly creates a team environment between people and digital workers working together to solve a process or a problem. It's not just connected to you and your own machine. This also democratises and puts things in the hands of businesses to automate more and more.

Mihir: In a seamless way, the bot will become part of our lives. I will do something and give something to the bot. The bot will then do something and send it to the supervisor to approve. And so on. It is a chain between people, bots and then other people and other bots. Also remember, just about anyone can make a bot. All it takes is a human being to have a need to learn. You can be trained and we expect that to happen. Just like the way we many of us learn how to use phones and TVs and all the electronic equipment. In this new generation everybody will learn how to make a bot and it will become their very nature.

The productivity of digital workers.

Mihir: Let’s say the leave management person in HR can be a digital worker as can be a worker in finance. Sometimes a worker can do 40-80% of the job, but in certain kinds of work a digital worker can assist you much more with an AI algorithm. It varies by nature of work. If it is just doing a transactional work, it can do the work of multiple people because it runs at the speed of the computer you're putting it on 24X7 without taking a break. That's the future of innovation and it's happening worldwide.

So virtually every company we know is now shifting their workforce to this augmented enterprise: Where human and digital workers work side by side. So, globally Automation Anywhere has 1.4 million bots and we are heading towards 3 million. For some companies the number of bots working as their work force could be as high as 30%. They are efficient too. Today a lot of automation outperforms and the bot is incapable of making an error unless you told it to.

Ankur: The work performance of a digital worker compared to a human worker has been validated by not just us, but by some of our partners, cutting across thousands of enterprises. The general rule of thumb is that it’s 3x going up to 8x. There's no upper limit in the future.

And it’s not just about money, time and work force but value. Let’s say a bank was conducting 6 checks before you give someone credit. Now technology can do say 25 checks, which was not feasible before. That changes the risk value for the bank which may be worth more than the 7 minutes saved.

RPA + AI + Analytics.

Ankur: We have combined RPA, AI and analytics because that’s the only way you can automate every process that can be automated. If you use just RPA you can only work with structured data and systems. But when you combine it with the power of cognitive and AI technologies and marry that with analytics, it drives the business value from the data.

Taking a look at the entire digital tsunami—IoT, Big Data, Cloud, RPA, AI, block chain— only RPA gives you a return in a few weeks or months. In everything else, there has to be at least a two year programme. So executives use this as oxygen to drive the digital transformation story further because this is tangible and can be immediately taken across the entire organisation.

RPA and productivity.

Mihir: We discovered when software is created, it initially provides productivity. But then it needs to be upgraded as businesses or ERP systems change. They took longer and longer to upgrade, eventually resulting in productivity losses. So one of the reasons why RPA is becoming more important in that context, is with RPA, the bots are your configurable software. When your business processes change, you can change them. You don't have to wait for a two or five year ERP upgrade cycle. In fact it can change in two hours and you have new software. This is the kind of software actually provides productivity.

Let’s call AI Augmented Intelligence.

Mihir: We have to think of AI as an Augmented Intelligence. Big difference! When I say Artificial Intelligence, you think of Hollywood’s Terminator, because anything artificial doesn't sound like a friend. I call it Augmented Intelligence because I actually augment myself with all kinds of tools and technology all the time. The narrative has to be changed.