Upskilling Robotic Process Automation (RPA) With Machine Learning

Congratulations! You have made the decision to join your industry peers and other companies across the globe in implementing processes automation software. Reducing those pesky high-volume, manual processes and fully automating back-office workflows are within reach. After a few months of testing and implementing your RPA solution, you begin to see positive business outcomes—until you hit the unstructured data wall.

RPA is just not that “smart”

A critical component that companies have been struggling to automate is the vast amount of unstructured data that’s part of a business’s everyday operations. Incoming emails, Word documents, PDFs—all these typical information formats pose a massive challenge to RPA because they are not standardized. Therefore, the “first mile” of your automated process still relies heavily on highly skilled professionals manually searching for the right data and entering it into a format that the RPA bots can understand.

Boosting automation intelligence

Machine learning (ML) technology can help. Incoming business-critical information that used to be stuck in emails and documents can be captured in real-time, quickly extracted, and transformed into a clean format. By combining machine learning with automation, all this clean data can then be placed into a centralized, auditable location where business users can review and analyze it for further action and automatically trigger their RPA bots to complete the remaining processes.

When document understanding becomes part of your automation cycle, your business will be able to unlock an entirely new level of productivity and efficiency. Faster processing times, more accurate decisions, and happier subject matter experts who can now devote their newly reclaimed time to strategic and innovative initiatives that will further your competitive advantage; these are just some examples of the benefits you expect to see after boosting your RPA with machine learning.

Ready to learn more about the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities? Discover technology trends and best practices that companies employ to transform some of their most challenging jobs in our webinar with Forrester.