Meet your new robotic colleagues. Friend or foe?

Imagine a future office in which the robot not only makes you tea but actually gets better at it over time. That is the very real future that awaits most workers. "You can imagine a world in five years' time when teams are made up of company employees, crowd specialists, and cognitive robots -- all creating and collaborating together", says Shamus Rae, the head of innovation and investments for KPMG in the UK. The future of robotic process automation also promises to bring more "human" intelligence to robots. "The robot would gain experience from its many interactions -- potentially thousands or more each day -- and gradually improve its responses", Rae explains in the KPMG report "The crowd in the cloud".