What Is Cognitive Automation? A Primer

Businesses are increasingly adopting cognitive automation as the next level in process automation. These six use cases show how the technology is making its mark in the enterprise. It can carry out various tasks, including determining the cause of a problem, resolving it on its own, and learning how to remedy it. 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. Intelligent automation streamlines processes that were otherwise composed of manual tasks or based on legacy systems, which can be resource-intensive, costly and prone to human error. The applications of IA span across industries, providing efficiencies in different areas of the business.

And using its AI capabilities, a digital worker can even identify patterns or trends that might have gone previously unnoticed by their human counterparts. By automating cognitive tasks, organizations can Chat PG reduce labor costs and optimize resource allocation. Automated systems can handle tasks more efficiently, requiring fewer human resources and allowing employees to focus on higher-value activities.

What are the differences between RPA and cognitive automation?

This allows us to automatically trigger different actions based on the type of document received. It infuses a cognitive ability and can accommodate the automation of business processes utilizing large volumes of text and images. Cognitive automation, therefore, marks a radical step forward compared to traditional RPA technologies that simply copy and repeat the activity originally performed by a person step-by-step. IA is capable of advanced data analytics techniques to process and interpret large volumes of data quickly and accurately. This enables organizations to gain valuable insights into their processes so they can make data-driven decisions.

Still, the enterprise requires humans to choose and apply automation techniques to specific tasks — for now. One area currently under development is the ability for machines to autonomously discover and optimize processes within the enterprise. Some automation tools have started to combine automation and cognitive technologies to figure out how processes are configured or actually operating. And they are automatically able to suggest and modify processes to improve overall flow, learn from itself to figure out better ways to handle process flow and conduct automatic orchestration of multiple bots to optimize processes. Cognitive automation utilizes data mining, text analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and automation to help employees with specific analytics tasks, without the need for IT or data scientists. Cognitive automation simulates human thought and subsequent actions to analyze and operate with accuracy and consistency.

Use case 3: Attended automation

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. Most businesses are only scratching the surface of cognitive automation and are yet to uncover their full potential. A cognitive automation solution may just be what it takes to revitalize resources and take operational performance to the next level. Thus, cognitive automation represents a leap forward in the evolutionary chain of automating processes – reason enough to dive a bit deeper into cognitive automation and how it differs from traditional process automation solutions.

Let’s break down how cognitive automation bridges the gaps where other approaches to automation, most notably Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and integration tools (iPaaS) fall short. Cognitive automation is a summarizing term for the application of Machine Learning technologies to automation cognitive automation tools in order to take over tasks that would otherwise require manual labor to be accomplished. The human brain is wired to notice patterns even where there are none, but cognitive automation takes this a step further, implementing accuracy and predictive modeling in its AI algorithm.

“The whole process of categorization was carried out manually by a human workforce and was prone to errors and inefficiencies,” Modi said. It gives businesses a competitive advantage by enhancing their operations in numerous areas. Workflow automation, screen scraping, and macro scripts are a few of the technologies it uses. It keeps track of the accomplishments and runs some simple statistics on it. In this situation, if there are difficulties, the solution checks them, fixes them, or, as soon as possible, forwards the problem to a human operator to avoid further delays.

It imitates the capability of decision-making and functioning of humans. This assists in resolving more difficult issues and gaining valuable insights from complicated data. The issues faced by Postnord were addressed, and to some extent, reduced, by Digitate‘s ignio AIOps Cognitive automation solution. Deliveries that are delayed are the worst thing that can happen to a logistics operations unit.

A large part of determining what is effective for process automation is identifying what kinds of tasks require true cognitive abilities. While machine learning has come a long way, enterprise automation tools are not capable of experience, intuition-based judgment or extensive analysis that might draw from existing knowledge in other areas. Because cognitive automation bots are still only trained based on data, these aspects of process automation are more difficult for machines. Many organizations have also successfully automated their KYC processes with RPA. KYC compliance requires organizations to inspect vast amounts of documents that verify customers’ identities and check the legitimacy of their financial operations.

Addressing the challenges most often faced by network operators empowers predictive operations over reactive solutions. Over time, these pre-trained systems can form their own connections automatically to continuously learn and adapt to incoming data. Traditional RPA is mainly limited to automating processes (which may or may not involve structured data) that need swift, repetitive actions without much contextual analysis or dealing with contingencies. In other words, the automation of business processes provided by them is mainly limited to finishing tasks within a rigid rule set.

ML-based cognitive automation tools make decisions based on the historical outcomes of previous alerts, current account activity, and external sources of information, such as customers’ social media. Companies looking for automation functionality will likely consider both Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and cognitive automation systems. While both traditional RPA and cognitive automation provide smart and efficient process automation tools, there are many differences in scope, methodology, processing capabilities, and overall benefits for the business. Cognitive Automation is the conversion of manual business processes to automated processes by identifying network performance issues and their impact on a business, answering with cognitive input and finding optimal solutions.

Automated processes can only function effectively as long as the decisions follow an “if/then” logic without needing any human judgment in between. However, this rigidity leads RPAs to fail to retrieve meaning and process forward unstructured data. Cognitive automation has the potential to completely reorient the work environment by elevating efficiency and empowering organizations and their people to make data-driven decisions quickly and accurately. “The governance of cognitive automation systems is different, and CIOs need to consequently pay closer attention to how workflows are adapted,” said Jean-François Gagné, co-founder and CEO of Element AI.

This knowledge-based approach adjusts for the more information-intensive processes by leveraging algorithms and technical methodology to make more informed data-driven business decisions. As enterprises continue to invest and rely on technologies, intelligent automation services will continue to prove powerful additions to the enterprise technology landscape. However, once we look past rote tasks, enterprise intelligent automation become more complex. Certain tasks are currently best suited for humans, such as those that require reading or understanding text, making complex decisions, or aspects of recognition or pattern matching. In addition, interactive tasks that require collaboration with other humans and rely on communication skills and empathy are difficult to automate with unintelligent tools. Moving up the ladder of enterprise intelligent automation can help companies performing increasingly more complex tasks that don’t always follow the same pattern or flow.

Yet these approaches are limited by the sheer volume of data that must be aggregated, sifted through, and understood well enough to act upon. But as those upward trends of scale, complexity, and pace continue to accelerate, it demands faster and smarter decision-making. This creates a whole new set of issues that an enterprise must confront. For example, an attended bot can bring up relevant data on an agent’s screen at the optimal moment in a live customer interaction to help the agent upsell the customer to a specific product.

Cognitive automation vs RPA

That’s why some people refer to RPA as “click bots”, although most applications nowadays go far beyond that. Cognitive process automation can automate complex cognitive tasks, enabling faster and more accurate data and information processing. This results in improved efficiency and productivity by reducing the time and effort required for tasks that traditionally rely on human cognitive abilities. As CIOs embrace more automation tools like RPA, they should also consider utilizing cognitive automation for higher-level tasks to further improve business processes. Cognitive automation has a place in most technologies built in the cloud, said John Samuel, executive vice president at CGS, an applications, enterprise learning and business process outsourcing company. His company has been working with enterprises to evaluate how they can use cognitive automation to improve the customer journey in areas like security, analytics, self-service troubleshooting and shopping assistance.

One of their biggest challenges is ensuring the batch procedures are processed on time. Organizations can monitor these batch operations with the use of cognitive automation solutions. Intelligent automation simplifies processes, frees up resources and improves operational efficiencies through various applications. An insurance provider can use intelligent automation to calculate payments, estimate rates and address compliance needs. When it comes to automation, tasks performed by simple workflow automation bots are fastest when those tasks can be carried out in a repetitive format. Processes that follow a simple flow and set of rules are most effective for yielding immediately effective results with nonintelligent bots.

In this example, the software bot mimics the human role of opening the email, extracting the information from the invoice and copying the information into the company’s accounting system. These tasks can range from answering complex customer queries to extracting pertinent information from document scans. Some examples of mature cognitive automation use cases include intelligent document processing and intelligent virtual agents. This approach ensures end users’ apprehensions regarding their digital literacy are alleviated, thus facilitating user buy-in. 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.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Like our brains’ neural networks creating pathways as we take in new information, cognitive automation makes connections in patterns and uses that information to make decisions. “With cognitive automation, CIOs can move the needle to high-value, high-frequency automations and have a bigger impact on the bottom line,” said Jon Knisley, principal of automation and process excellence at FortressIQ. “The shift from basic RPA to cognitive automation unlocks significant value for any organization and has notable implications across a number of areas for the CIO,” said James Matcher, partner in the technology consulting practice at EY.

A cognitive automation solution is a positive development in the world of automation. It now has a new set of capabilities above RPA, thanks to the addition of AI and ML. Some of the capabilities of cognitive automation include self-healing and rapid triaging. However, if you are impressed by them and implement them in your business, first, you should know the differences between cognitive automation and RPA.

With the help of deep learning and artificial intelligence in radiology, clinicians can intelligently assess pathology and radiology reports to understand the cancer cases presented and augment subsequent care workflows accordingly. He suggested CIOs start to think about how to break up their service delivery experience into the appropriate pieces to automate using existing technology. The automation footprint could scale up with improvements in cognitive automation components. There are a number of advantages to cognitive automation over other types of AI. They are designed to be used by business users and be operational in just a few weeks.

It also helps organizations identify potential risks, monitor compliance adherence and flag potential fraud, errors or missing information. AI and ML are fast-growing advanced technologies that, when augmented with automation, can take RPA to the next level. Traditional RPA without IA’s other technologies tends to be limited to automating simple, repetitive processes involving structured data. IA or cognitive automation has a ton of real-world applications across sectors and departments, from automating HR employee onboarding and payroll to financial loan processing and accounts payable. Cognitive automation can use AI to reduce the cases where automation gets stuck while encountering different types of data or different processes.

You can also check our article on intelligent automation in finance and accounting for more examples. “We see a lot of use cases involving scanned documents that have to be manually processed one by one,” said Sebastian Schrötel, vice president of machine learning and intelligent robotic process automation at SAP. The company implemented a cognitive automation application based on established global standards https://chat.openai.com/ to automate categorization at the local level. The incoming data from retailers and vendors, which consisted of multiple formats such as text and images, are now processed using cognitive automation capabilities. The local datasets are matched with global standards to create a new set of clean, structured data. This approach led to 98.5% accuracy in product categorization and reduced manual efforts by 80%.

A cognitive automated system can immediately access the customer’s queries and offer a resolution based on the customer’s inputs. A new connection, a connection renewal, a change of plans, technical difficulties, etc., are all examples of queries. Cognitive automation represents a range of strategies that enhance automation’s ability to gather data, make decisions, and scale automation. It also suggests how AI and automation capabilities may be packaged for best practices documentation, reuse, or inclusion in an app store for AI services.

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 adoption of cognitive RPA in healthcare and as a part of pharmacy automation comes naturally. In such a high-stake industry, decreasing the error rate is extremely valuable. Moreover, clinics deal with vast amounts of unstructured data coming from diagnostic tools, reports, knowledge bases, the internet of medical things, and other sources. This causes healthcare professionals to spend inordinate amounts of time and concentration to interpret this information. In addition, cognitive automation tools can understand and classify different PDF documents.

RPA bots can successfully retrieve information from disparate sources for further human-led KYC analysis. In this case, cognitive automation takes this process a step further, relieving humans from analyzing this type of data. Similar to the aforementioned AML transaction monitoring, ML-powered bots can judge situations based on the context and real-time analysis of external sources like mass media.

Given its potential, companies are starting to embrace this new technology in their processes. According to a 2019 global business survey by Statista, around 39 percent of respondents confirmed that they have already integrated cognitive automation at a functional level in their businesses. Also, 32 percent of respondents said they will be implementing it in some form by the end of 2020.

This Week In Cognitive Automation: AI Ethics, Employee Engagement

And if you are planning to invest in an off-the-shelf RPA solution, scroll through our data-driven list of RPA tools and other automation solutions. Realizing that they can not build every cognitive solution, top RPA companies are investing in encouraging developers to contribute to their marketplaces where a variety of cognitive solutions from different vendors can be purchased. Change used to occur on a scale of decades, with technology catching up to support industry shifts and market demands. “The problem is that people, when asked to explain a process from end to end, will often group steps or fail to identify a step altogether,” Kohli said.

It has the potential to improve organizations’ productivity by handling repetitive or time-intensive tasks and freeing up your human workforce to focus on more strategic activities. Various combinations of artificial intelligence (AI) with process automation capabilities are referred to as cognitive automation to improve business outcomes. The value of intelligent automation in the world today, across industries, is unmistakable.

With time, this gains new capabilities, making it better suited to handle complicated problems and a variety of exceptions. According to experts, cognitive automation is the second group of tasks where machines may pick up knowledge and make decisions independently or with people’s assistance. Manual duties can be more than onerous in the telecom industry, where the user base numbers millions.

Now, IT leaders are looking to expand the range of cognitive automation use cases they support in the enterprise. ServiceNow’s onboarding procedure starts before the new employee’s first work day. It handles all the labor-intensive processes involved in settling the employee in. These include setting up an organization account, configuring an email address, granting the required system access, etc.

The organization can use chatbots to carry out procedures like policy renewal, customer query ticket administration, resolving general customer inquiries at scale, etc. 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.

It can also include other automation approaches such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to read and analyze data in different formats. These are the solutions that get consultants and executives most excited. Vendors claim that 70-80% of corporate knowledge tasks can be automated with increased cognitive capabilities. To deal with unstructured data, cognitive bots need to be capable of machine learning and natural language processing. Cognitive automation is the current focus for most RPA companies’ product teams.

When introducing automation into your business processes, consider what your goals are, from improving customer satisfaction to reducing manual labor for your staff. Consider how you want to use this intelligent technology and how it will help you achieve your desired business outcomes. Task mining and process mining analyze your current business processes to determine which are the best automation candidates. They can also identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your processes so you can make improvements before implementing further technology. While there are clear benefits of cognitive automation, it is not easy to do right, Taulli said. CIOs need to create teams that have expertise with data, analytics and modeling.

• Companies want systems to automatically perform reviews on items like contracts to identify favorable terms, consistency in word choice and set up templates quickly to avoid unnecessary exceptions.
• Moreover, clinics deal with vast amounts of unstructured data coming from diagnostic tools, reports, knowledge bases, the internet of medical things, and other sources.
• And without making it overly technical, we find that a basic knowledge of fundamental concepts is important to understand what can be achieved through such applications.
• Additionally, it can gather and save staff data generated for use in the future.

These enhancements have the potential to open new automation use cases and enhance the performance of existing automations. The coolest thing is that as new data is added to a cognitive system, the system can make more and more connections. This allows cognitive automation systems to keep learning unsupervised, and constantly adjusting to the new information they are being fed. Though cognitive automation is a relatively recent phenomenon, most solutions are offered by Robotic Process Automation (RPA) companies. Check out our RPA guide or our guide on RPA vendor comparison for more info.

However, simply automating rote tasks is not sufficient to deal with the continuous changes those enterprises face. In order to provide greater value, these automation tools need to step up the ladder of cognitive automation, incorporating AI and cognitive technologies to see increased value. Intelligent/cognitive automation tools allow RPA tools to handle unstructured information and make decisions based on complex, unstructured input. Cognitive automation (also called smart or intelligent automation) is an emerging field that augments RPA tools with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities like optical character recognition (OCR) or natural language processing (NLP). It deals with both structured and unstructured data including text heavy reports. Cognitive automation, or IA, combines artificial intelligence with robotic process automation to deploy intelligent digital workers that streamline workflows and automate tasks.

You might even have noticed that some RPA software vendors — Automation Anywhere is one of them — are attempting to be more precise with their language. Rather than call our intelligent software robot (bot) product an AI-based solution, we say it is built around cognitive computing theories. It represents a spectrum of approaches that improve how automation can capture data, automate decision-making and scale automation. It also suggests a way of packaging AI and automation capabilities for capturing best practices, facilitating reuse or as part of an AI service app store.

Digitate‘s ignio, a cognitive automation technology, helps with the little hiccups to keep the system functioning. The cognitive automation solution looks for errors and fixes them if any portion fails. If not, it instantly brings it to a person’s attention for prompt resolution. The automation solution also foresees the length of the delay and other follow-on effects. As a result, the company can organize and take the required steps to prevent the situation.

A self-driving enterprise is one where the cognitive automation platform acts as a digital brain that sits atop and interconnects all transactional systems within that organization. This “brain” is able to comprehend all of the company’s operations and replicate them at scale. Through cognitive automation, enterprise-wide decision-making processes are digitized, augmented, and automated. Once a cognitive automation platform understands how to operate the enterprise’s processes autonomously, it can also offer real-time insights and recommendations on actions to take to improve performance and outcomes.

Automated process bots are great for handling the kind of reporting tasks that tend to fall between departments. If one department is responsible for reviewing a spreadsheet for mismatched data and then passing on the incorrect fields to another department for action, a software agent could easily manage every step for which the department was responsible. These are just two examples where cognitive automation brings huge benefits. You can also check out our success stories where we discuss some of our customer cases in more detail.

By leaving routine tasks to robots, humans can squeeze the most value from collaboration and emotional intelligence. This is why robotic process automation consulting is becoming increasingly popular with enterprises. Cognitive automation typically refers to capabilities offered as part of a commercial software package or service customized for a particular use case. For example, an enterprise might buy an invoice-reading service for a specific industry, which would enhance the ability to consume invoices and then feed this data into common business processes in that industry.

TalkTalk received a solution from Splunk that enables the cognitive solution to manage the entire backend, giving customers access to an immediate resolution to their issues. Identifying and disclosing any network difficulties has helped TalkTalk enhance its network. As a result, they have greatly decreased the frequency of major incidents and increased uptime. Intending to enhance Bookmyshow‘s client interactions, Splunk has provided them with a cognitive automation solution.

This article will explain to you in detail which cognitive automation solutions are available for your company and hopefully guide you to the most suitable one according to your needs. Through cognitive automation, it is possible to automate most of the essential routine steps involved in claims processing. These tools can port over your customer data from claims forms that have already been filled into your customer database. It can also scan, digitize, and port over customer data sourced from printed claim forms which would traditionally be read and interpreted by a real person. In contrast, cognitive automation or Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) can accommodate both structured and unstructured data to automate more complex processes.

While automation is old as the industrial revolution, digitization greatly increased activities that could be automated. However, initial tools for automation, which includes scripts, macros and robotic process automation (RPA) bots, focus on automating simple, repetitive processes. However, as those processes are automated with the help of more programming and better RPA tools, processes that require higher level cognitive functions are next in the line for automation. “The ability to handle unstructured data makes intelligent automation a great tool to handle some of the most mission-critical business functions more efficiently and without human error,” said Prince Kohli, CTO of Automation Anywhere. He sees cognitive automation improving other areas like healthcare, where providers must handle millions of forms of all shapes and sizes. Employee time would be better spent caring for people rather than tending to processes and paperwork.