Over the past year, the appropriation of robotic process automation, especially progressed macros or "robotic workers" intended to automate the most ordinary, dull and time-exorbitant tasks has seen significant growth. As the technology develops alongside artificial intelligence and machine learning, the most encouraging future for knowledge workers is one where the simplicity of arrangement of RPA and the raw power of machine learning join to make more productive, more intelligent robotic workers. One of the keys for adoption is companies would prefer not to trouble individuals with a lot of new tools and permit their environments to learn. For each situation, what companies attempt to do is, whatever UI they're working in, possibly they make a widget, perhaps there's a dashboard that we can add a panel to that that would contain the data that is required. Adding to their current UI or including a stage over that routes things to the correct individual so they don't see 80% of the cases that they would have seen because they were automatically delegated and never got there.

Japan's robot hotel, the Hen-na ("Strange") Hotel, was supposed to represent the future of lodging with automatons taking care of things that previously required'inefficient' humans. That strategy is coming apart at the seams, however. Hen-na has'fired' over half of its 243 robots after the machines frequently created more problems than they solved. The cute Chu-ri robot you see above, for instance, frequently can't answer questions or may activate in the middle of the night due to snoring. And Chu-ri-chan is just the tip of the iceberg.

Banks have made large headcount cuts over the last five to 10 years, driven by the financial crash and regulatory changes, says Grant Goodband, client manager at Thoughtonomy. Thoughtonomy is a technology company developing robotic workers for robotic process automation (RPA). While these external factors cannot be controlled, banks can decide how they react to such external factors, says Goodband: "The efficiency and flexibility of intelligent automation enables bank employees to react faster and in a more compliant manner." While this may sound great from a corporate profitability perspective, it will worry people in corporate treasury. But RPA vendors insist human workers have nothing to fear.