What Is Cognitive Automation? A Primer

CSPs everywhere are reinventing themselves to face the challenges but also the amazing opportunities that this new digital world encompasses. The fundamental transformation happening today in the telecom world has had a deep effect on how CSPs engage with customers and the type of product portfolio mix being offered. The need to open the ecosystem and include partners from such diverse origins – financial services, OTTs, health care, etc. – forced a new approach to deal with this dynamic environment. Adding value along the CSPs digital transformation journey, with an eye on efficiency gains and better customer service. Built on an open, hybrid platform and embedded with Watson, IBM AI-Powered Automation is an integrated suite of domain-specific business and IT software -IBM Cloud Paks for Automation.

• More sophisticated software platforms – the software platforms underlying RPA are not new; some of them have been around for many years.
• Cognitive automation simulates human thought and subsequent actions to analyze and operate with accuracy and consistency.
• Only the simplest tools, initially built in 2000s before the explosion of interest in RPA are in this bucket.
• As Co-Founder and CEO, Jonathan has over 14+ years experience in helping clients build and manage cutting edge technology and teams.
• At the other end of the continuum, cognitive automation mimics human thought and action to manage and analyze large volumes with far greater speed, accuracy and consistency than even humans.
• In this realm, case- and design-oriented research is needed on how to select suitable tasks and processes to be automated with cognitive automation, as well as to choose and design the right cognitive automation tools (Poosapati et al., 2018).

Especially if you’re not intimately familiar with the tech industry and its automated contributors, Robotic Process Automation probably sounds impressive. RPA leverages structured data to perform monotonous human tasks with greater precision and accuracy. Any task that is rule-based and does not require analytical skills or cognitive thinking such as answering queries, performing calculations, and maintaining records and transactions can be taken over by RPA. Our Educational Technology Services backed by analytics, AI and machine learning focusses on hyper personalized engagement over the lifetime of the learner. 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.

Redefining Inventory Optimization with Cognitive Automation

These bots specialize in their field just as an Underwriter, Loan Officer, or Accounts Payable Specialist does. With 80% of their needed knowledge already pre-developed, they can plug-and-play in just a few weeks, teaching itself what it doesn’t know. This significantly reduces the costs across every stage of the technology life cycle. Compared to the millions required in RPA and IPA, Cognitive Process Automation can often be implemented for as little as the cost of adding one person to your workforce, but with the output of four to eight headcount. Although Intelligent Process Automation leverages Machine Learning to avoid mistakes and breaks in the system, it has some of the same issues as traditional Robotic Process Automation. First, it is expensive and out of reach for most mid-market and even many enterprise organizations.

Cognitive automation is based on algorithms and technological approaches such as natural language processing, text analytics, data mining, semantic technologies, and machine learning. The more we dive into artificial intelligence and automation, the more terms we need to learn. Different AI capabilities, different ways to train a machine, and different types of automation all make for a complex glossary of terms to navigate. One new kind of automation – and a newer term for navigation – is called cognitive automation. It combines the worlds of automation, artificial intelligence, and cognitive computing.

Transform Your Business Processes

However, that this was only the start in an ever-changing evolution of business process automation. RPA helps businesses support innovation without having to pay heavily to test new ideas. It frees up time for employees to do more cognitive and complex tasks and can be implemented promptly as opposed to traditional automation systems. It increases staff productivity and reduces costs and attrition by taking over the performance of tedious tasks over longer durations. The global RPA market is expected to reach USD 3.11 billion by 2025, according to a new study by Grand View Research, Inc. At the same time, the Artificial Intelligence market which is a core part of cognitive automation is expected to exceed USD 191 Billion by 2024 at a CAGR of 37%.

• This is less of an issue when cognitive automation services are only used for straightforward tasks like using OCR and machine vision to automatically interpret an invoice’s text and structure.
• Cognitive automation impacts both organizations and IS ecosystems, which requires companies to approach cognitive automation initiatives in a strategic manner (Hofmann et al., 2020a, b).
• Health treatment recommendation systems that help providers create customized care plans that take into account individual patients’ health status and previous treatments.
• We encountered several organizations that wasted time and money pursuing the wrong technology for the job at hand.
• This enables Intelligent Process Automation to take on more complex and advanced processes than Robotic Process Automation alone.
• Clearly, the people who take the assessment quickly identify the gaps they have against the best practices and build a road map to close the gaps.

Consequently, these systems need to take into account vast amounts of details as more business processes require analysis and insights that allow controlling them beyond rule-based execution or prefitted controllers (Bruckner et al., 2012). Thus, as explained earlier, in the realm of BPA, the phenomenon of cognitive automation is particularly instantiated by the application of technologies from the realm of AI, i.e., ML, which includes Deep Learning. These technologies are used to create machines that perform tasks and processes based on context by applying, for instance, natural language processing or image recognition, etc. (Poosapati et al., 2018). WfM as the early beginnings and still widespread and valid foundation of BPA can be viewed as an answer to the call for seizing the opportunities of IT for managing business processes in an automated manner (W. Van Der Aalst et al., 2004). A prominent example includes processing of customer payments through multiple departments of a bank in an end-to-end manner – known by the name of straight-through processing. In WfM, business processes are designed on a higher level of abstraction before the design and implementation of the respective IS and organizational structures and processes is pursued (W. Van Der Aalst et al., 2004).

What are the key differences between cognitive automation and RPA?

This makes it easier for business users to provision and customize cognitive automation that reflects their expertise and familiarity with the business. In practice, they may have to work with tool experts to ensure the services are resilient, are secure and address any privacy requirements. Robotic Process Automation – RPA – is impacting the very way companies do business. Negotiating the right contracts with your RPA software vendor along with your outsourcing service providers is critical. When we can quickly assess our options and determine the best path forward, we’re doing more than serving our customers. Since supply chains are dynamic systems, we affect our inputs whenever we enact a decision about them.

• Whatever the state or size of your problem, cognitive automation, artificial intelligence and advanced analytics can offer actionable solutions for the world we live in now.
• Companies looking for automation functionality will likely consider both Robotic Process Automation and cognitive automation systems.
• The human job losses we’ve seen were primarily due to attrition of workers who were not replaced or through automation of outsourced work.
• Notably, we adopt open source tools and standardized data protocols to enable advanced automation.
• Autonomy refers to an entity’s or agent’s ability to act self- determined and independently (Janiesch et al., 2019).
• Before embarking on an AI initiative, companies must understand which technologies perform what types of tasks, and the strengths and limitations of each.

More sophisticated cognitive automation that automates decision processes requires more planning, customization and ongoing iteration to see the best results. We work closely with clients to evaluate organizational technology and process readiness and then build a comprehensive automation strategy and roadmap that unlocks maximum value for the enterprise. Our intelligent automation services integrate people and processes across multiple business functions to scale enterprise automation initiatives for maximum ROI. Finally, a company may collect more data than its existing human or computer firepower can adequately analyze and apply. For example, a company may have massive amounts of data on consumers’ digital behavior but lack insight about what it means or how it can be strategically applied.

Cognitive Automation and Medical Supply Chains: Putting Patients First

The collapsing of the traditional IT stacks across the previously siloed layers of applications and infrastructure is driving the demand for consulting services. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that enterprises have already captured most of the potential value from offshore labor arbitrage. Cognitive automation, while transformative in nature, does not require a transformation of your underlying technical infrastructure. It does not, or should not, require time-consuming and costly changes to technology infrastructure and processes. In the supply chain world, we’re turning to cognitive automation, which is the digitization, augmentation, and automation of decision making, to more quickly react to an ever-changing environment. Because the gap between current and desired AI capabilities is not always obvious, companies should create pilot projects for cognitive applications before rolling them out across the entire enterprise.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem’s work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch like Business Insider.

The way of providing automation

Here’s how Vanguard redesigned its work processes to get the most from the new system. If your firm plans to launch several pilots, consider creating a cognitive center of excellence or similar structure to manage them. This approach helps build the needed technology skills and capabilities within the organization, while also helping to move small pilots into broader applications that will have a greater impact.

Whether that be advancing new technology eco-systems or simply tweaking how we do our everyday work. We push the boundaries of innovation not because we have too, but because it is in our innate nature to do so. Through the cognitive functions lens-a socio-technical analysis of predictive maintenance.16th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (pp. 1–16). AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses including 55% of Fortune 500 every month.

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. Partnering with an experienced vendor with expertise across the continuum can help accelerate the automation journey. As the knowledge economy gains prominence, businesses that leverage intelligent process automation by combining RPA and cognitive automation will be better positioned to empower their new-age workers, enhancing both customer and business outcomes. 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. Our intelligent and cognitive automation services deliver dynamic workflows that combine Robotic Process Automation, cognitive engines, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence to drive enterprise-wide business transformation.

The study provided us with important insights into what allows companies to realize value from investing in RPA. For instance, at the outset, executives believe RPA is an easy way to automate tasks and thus increase productivity. But the study participants’ experiences reveal that, in theory, RPA is simple but, in practice, it’s difficult.