Automation Anywhere, a global leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), announced the launch of Bot Security, the industry's first security program to set the standard for securing software bots that enable business continuity. The magnitude of the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak has organizations around the world looking to technologies like RPA and intelligent automation to help mitigate disruptions and advance public health, keep global supply chains moving and governments afloat. The company introduced a flexible, multi-tiered framework to certify that bots built by customers, partners, and publishers of bots on Bot Store – the world's largest intelligent automation marketplace with more than 850 pre-built bots – are pre-certified and trusted to scale RPA more rapidly and securely. With Bot Security, users downloading ready-to-deploy intelligent software bots no longer have to compromise on security as they build RPA solutions to access critical data, track the virus's spread and direct citizens to vital information from trusted sources. Automation Anywhere leads the industry as the first vendor to offer a web-based, cloud-native RPA platform that is System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type 1 certified.

Automation Anywhere, a global leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), announced the launch of Bot Security, the industry's first security program to set the standard for securing software bots that enable business continuity. The magnitude of the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak has organizations around the world looking to technologies like RPA and intelligent automation to help mitigate disruptions and advance public health, keep global supply chains moving and governments afloat. Today, the company introduced a flexible, multi-tiered framework to certify that bots built by customers, partners, and publishers of bots on Bot Store – the world's largest intelligent automation marketplace with more than 850 pre-built bots – are pre-certified and trusted to scale RPA more rapidly and securely. With Bot Security, users downloading ready-to-deploy intelligent software bots no longer have to compromise on security as they build RPA solutions to access critical data, track the virus' spread and direct citizens to vital information from trusted sources. Automation Anywhere leads the industry as the first vendor to offer a web-based, cloud-native RPA platform that is System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type 1 certified.

Automation Anywhere has opened its Bot Store to machine learning and AI developers, allowing them to offer up their bots for developing new applications and services. The company has added its cognitive IQ Bot tech into the mix, to help turn unstructured data into structured data for developing business processes such as financial data. Integrating automation into invoicing, payments and purchase ordering will enable verticals struggling with innovation to concentrate on being art eh forefront of their industry rather than dealing with reams of paperwork. Bot Store has grown rapidly as a resource for developers to share their plug'n' play, off the shelf robots. In fact, Automation Anywhere says the marketplace has grown 100% just two months after launching.

"Conversation is the command line of tomorrow," so asserted Daniel Harvey, experience design director at the SapientNitro marketing agency, speaking at the Interact UK conference earlier this month. The command-line interface (CLI) dates back to the 1960s and has long offered us an efficient way to have computers do our bidding, as long as the right syntax and grammar are in place. "It's very much the case where you can actually live in just Messenger and get everything done that you need to do." -- Daniel Harvey In our new world of chatbots, we are following right in line with the CLI, but without anyone having to type a word. From Siri to IBM's dear Watson, the conversational user interface is taking over where apps left off. Chatbots can interact with humans to learn what they are looking for and perhaps guide them to the correct place.

Everything is golden in the bot age, right? Some things are better and some new challenges have spun up. Here are some considerations if you are thinking of building a conversational product or weaponizing an existing product for the bot age. A lot has been written on the topic. For example: Here's a good piece on when to go native app versus conversational bot.

A weathercat." -- Poncho asked me where I was, so it could tell me the local weather forecast. I could have shared my location using Messenger's built-in location-sharing feature, but that would take me through three in-app menu screens, and wasn't the point of chatbots to chat?

Advancements in artificial intelligence when combined with proliferation of various messaging apps, is fuelling the development of ChatBots which can carry out various kinds of tasks such as scheduling a meeting, reporting temperature, assisting users buy a new gadget, etc. This has lead businesses to invest heavily in the chat economy. The bot revolution is still in early phase, but the enthusiasm is clearly growing rapidly among customers and businesses. Lets take a look at some of the ChatBots already build and being used by businesses. Bots and Bot Stores are one of the biggest trends to watch out for in social media, especially social messaging apps.

The very first chatbot, ELIZA, was developed 50 years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist, someone who just repeats the human user's words back to the human; it is not very good. In the following decades, chatbots were mostly of academic interest. But in recent years, smartphone-based chatbots have gained wide interest from the industry with high profile products such as the Apple Siri, Amazon Echo, and China's WeChat. In 2016, chatbots are one of the hottest trends in technology.

Technology is playing an ever-important role in the shopping side of the holiday season. Logistics aside, which is of course critical at this time of year, tech is also proving increasingly key from an experiential and a customer service perspective both online and offline. Leading that charge for 2016 are virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). Google has employed the former this year, for instance, to allow consumers to'walk' along Fifth Avenue in New York to experience all the holiday window displays. Window Wonderland, as the initiative is called, is a VR experience that lets users view 18 different retailers including Bloomingdale's, Barneys New York, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany & Co, Burberry and more.

Over the past few months, the internet has been buzzing about bots. Microsoft, Facebook and other major players are opening up their A.I. platforms for developers, and these toolkits are an exciting and important step towards democratizing access to A.I. For the enterprise, however, the bot frenzy has accelerated a challenge that executives have been facing for the past couple of years. Many enterprise companies understand that they need an A.I. strategy and that the technology will be deployed throughout their business. Yet the challenge for them is where to actually begin. These companies understand that A.I. is a transformational integration for their business and that it will eventually touch everything from their customer service, their analytics and business intelligence, sales and CRM, and even internal knowledge management and HCM.