The tools, announced at Amazon's annual cloud event in Las Vegas, aim to help the company's cloud customers incorporate functionality such as natural language processing, but without long waits often associated with AI-related projects. Amazon says it is making this possible by integrating machine learning into the two new stand-alone services. "There's no machine-learning expertise required for either of these services. They're just plug and play. You don't have to get into all the weeds and get the training data and label the data and all those sorts of things," said Matt Wood, vice president for artificial intelligence services at Amazon Web Services.

A few years ago, consulting giant McKinsey predicted that artificial intelligence and automation would eliminate a 73 million jobs by 2030. That's a scary number of jobs, and a prediction that led many professionals to evaluate their own skills and research ways to future-proof their careers from the coming automation/AI job apocalypse. In the absence of an elder expert giving you one word of advice, like "Plastics!" what can an IT professional (or a new graduate) do to ensure that the robots don't come to take your job? That's been a key question over the past few years, and one without that simple one-word answer. Experts have said that jobs focused on implementing and managing artificial intelligence and automation would be great avenues for job-seekers to pursue.

The companies are UiPath Inc., Blue Prism Group PRSM 3.81% PLC and Automation Anywhere Inc. They were all founded in 2005 or earlier, but it wasn't until the past few years that they took off after hitting on their current business automating simple back-office tasks and dubbing it "robotic process automation." UiPath on Monday completed a new funding round at a $3 billion valuation, said a person familiar with the process, six months after a prior round valued it at $1.1 billion. In July, rival Automation Anywhere raised its first round of financing at a $1.8 billion valuation. Shares in Blue Prism, a public company in the U.K., have risen nearly 30 times since they were listed in March 2016.

Today's businesses must continually improve process efficiencies to stay competitive. Given the high cost of human labor, they are turning to AI and intelligent automation technologies to lower costs and increase ROI. While there's considerable anxiety in some parts of the workforce about the impact of AI and intelligent automation, experts say workers and their employers are happier when humans focus on what they do best. Forrester Research has defined a six-level maturity model that describes where companies fit along the automation spectrum. At the lower levels, companies are experimenting and piloting technology.

While many digitally advanced companies are targeting artificial intelligence (AI) efforts directly at customers, employees may stand to gain the most as the technology matures, according to a Tuesday Forrester report. Global employee engagement has not improved the past 17 years, according to Gallup. The issue may be getting worse, as workers increasingly must navigate a maze of legacy systems, underused and poorly integrated apps, and accelerating training needs. Augmenting human workers with AI capabilities can lessen the burden and offer more time for human interaction, wrote Craig Le Clair, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester and author of the report. Many businesses have turned to chatbots for customer service, with mixed results: Chatbot success rate for service is low, with some early adopters pulling back, the report noted.

The proliferation of robots completing manual tasks traditionally done by humans suggests we have entered the machine automation age. And while nothing captures the imagination like self-directing machines shuttling merchandise around warehouses, most automation today comes courtesy of software bots that perform clerical tasks such as data entry. Here's the good news: Far from a frontal assault on cubicle inhabitants, these software agents may eventually net more jobs than they consume, as they pave the way for companies to create new knowledge domain and customer-facing positons for employees, analysts say. The approach, known as robotic process automation (RPA), automates tasks that office workers would normally conduct with the assistance of a computer, says Deloitte LLP Managing Director David Schatsky, who recently published research on the topic. RPA's potential will grow as it is combined with cognitive technologies to make bots more intelligent, ideally increasing their value to businesses.

In fairly short order, robots have begun taking over in the corporate world. This is nothing like the feared "singularity," that prophesied (if dubious) moment when machines become smarter than humans and then, to prove it, commence wiping us out. But robots are indeed infiltrating finance departments, some other functions, and operational areas in a number of industries. For the most part, robots are being deployed to automate repeatable, standardized, or logical tasks historically handled by people. In finance and accounting, think procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, and record-to-report processes.