Aggressive marketing language can often drive a lack of clarity around technical concepts. Somewhat surprising, is that confusion between RPA and AI is high even among organizations that have automation in place and have likely gone through the diligence and/or request for proposal (RFP) process to select their automation solution. More than 50 percent of CFOs and revenue cycle leaders in organizations that are actively using automation say they consider RPA to be a form of artificial intelligence. "RPA based bots can be good tools for automating simple, discrete, and static tasks," said Varun Ganapathi, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Alpha Health. "AI and machine learning based technologies are capable of automating much more complex tasks that require some degree of judgment or subject matter expertise. Additionally, AI and machine learning based solutions can have the ability to navigate changes or new variables without the need to reprogram or recode a bot every time something changes."

Malinka Waliyadde is Co-Founder & CEO of Alpha Health, the first Unified Automation company for revenue cycle management in healthcare. It's an irony of the human condition that often, when we are at the depth of our ignorance, we are at the height of our confidence. Technology, machines and AI (artificial intelligence) don't automatically fix this folly. Like humans, these systems do not always understand when they are wrong about their own competence (for example, if the state of the world changes from when the AI model was originally trained). But integrating people into a system that uses machine learning goes a long way toward eliminating blind spots.