The robots are coming – and they're going to take your jobs. That is a popular mantra, but I really want to let some of the (hot) air out of the inflated robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) hype. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid. This email address is already registered.

Robotic process automation has the potential to deliver significant cost efficiencies to many businesses, but those efficiencies could be wiped out – or worse – if the robots are not properly licensed to work with the organisation's existing software estate. Every conference this year contains a dead human genius reincarnated as software system or a robot. Yes, there is a lot of hype, but there is real worth in AI and Machine Learning. Read our counseling on how to avoid adopting "black box" approach. You forgot to provide an Email Address.

You are in an elevator and your watch starts vibrating and one swipe tells you that it's an important alert from your bank. You are facing some issues with your banking transaction and you are connected to a chatbot (an intelligent robot at the bank's contact centre) and over a series of messages, the bot meticulously addresses your problem. This indicates the onset of a digital era which is set to transform the way people work and interact in daily business activities. Intelligent automation, software robotics, cognitive computing, augmented reality and machine learning have the potential to increase productivity, improve efficiency, and reduce time-to-market and reshape the manner in which people and enterprises function. Many industry experts believe that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) will become pervasive across industries in the next decade.

Image: Shailesh Andrade / Reuters Private sector lender HDFC Bank on Monday unveiled the humanoid'IRA' (intelligent robotic assistant), which will provide assistance to bank customers. "The humanoid will be operational at one of the branches of HDFC Bank, in about two weeks' time," said Nitin Chugh, the bank's digital banking country head. He said that based on the response received for the humanoid, the bank will decide on whether to deploy additional robots in more branches. HDFC Bank, which has a strong foothold in the digital banking and financial technologies space to improve banking services for its customers, will focus on the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual Reality (VR), block chain and rural fintech, to boost banking experience. These five platforms form the theme for the second edition of HDFC Bank's Digital Innovation Summit, details of which was announced on Monday.

Mumbai: ICICI Bank, India's largest private sector bank, today announced the deployment of'Software Robotics' in over 200 business processes across various functions of the bank. The bank is the first in the country and among few, globally, to deploy'Software Robotics' that emulates human actions to automate and perform repetitive, high volume and time consuming business tasks cutting across multiple applications. At ICICI Bank, software robots have reduced the response time to customers by up to 60% and increased accuracy to 100% thereby sharply improving the bank's productivity and efficiency. It has also enabled the bank's employees to focus more on value-added and customer-related functions. The software robots now perform over 10 lakh banking transactions every working day.

Chanda Kochhar, managing director & chief executive officer, ICICI Bank, said by the end of FY17, the bank would more than double the number of transactions cleared by the bots. "Currently, about 10 per cent of our internal transactions are being carried out via the software robots and by the end of this year, we believe, this will go up to 20 per cent of our transactions. This has helped us in improving productivity and efficiency and will help us in handling larger volumes as we continue to grow." The lender started experimenting with software bots at the beginning of this financial year. Now, over a million banking transactions across 200 business processes are carried out by the technology on a daily basis.