The Demise Of The Dumb Bots & The Four Levels Of Cognitive Automation

Artificial intelligence is being applied to a broad range of applications from self-driving vehicles to predictive maintenance. Some of the more mundane, and even boring, applications are focused on helping improve automation of back office operations. There has been a real acceleration in the use of automation tools for back office operation, with much attention (and money) flowing to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools. However, these tools are not intelligent, per se. None of the vendors in the space are claiming that their tools can be classified as AI, however, increasingly end-users are seeing process automation tools as solving issues of digitization of processes that are required to adopt more intelligent, machine learning-based approaches for process discovery, definition, orchestration, and optimization.