Now, a complex AI-driven automation initiative like cognitive RPA is majorly anchored by bots. They need extensive strategy, support, maintenance and trouble-shooting arsenal around it – in a continuous manner. Process changes, app updates, security patches etc. have a huge impact on bots and involve human intervention. Bot maintenance and governance should be a conscious and well-thought out strategy from day one. Having a Robotic Operations Center (ROC) in place makes the job easier for enterprises betting big on cognitive RPA.

Cognitive robotic process automation (RPA) is a fast-evolving field of computing and is an emerging form of business process automation (BPA) technology. It involves the automation of many internal and external customer journeys through software "bots." RPA started roughly 20 years ago as a rudimentary screen-scraping tool, technology that is used to eliminate repetitive data entry or form-filling that human operators used to do the bulk of. For example, the software could copy data from one source to another on a computer screen. Imagine a finance clerk handling invoice processes by filling in specific fields on the screen. Early RPA was able to take this function off the clerk's plate by automating that invoice processing.

Cognitive Robotic Process Automation is the next step in the evolution of robotic process automation trends. Many of the leading robotic process automation companies are already eyeing the big shift towards the cognitive automation. Cognitive robotic process automation is basically a combination of robotic process automation and Data Analytics, which together make it easy and effective to manage processes that are information-intensive, in an intelligent and efficient manner. By that definition, it is a marriage between artificial intelligence and cognitive computing methods. By incorporating artificial intelligence, cognitive automation broadens the scope and depth of actions that would typically be associated with RPA.