Public healthcare organisations across the UK have teamed up with the vendor Thoughtonomy to launch the first National Health Service (NHS) marketplace for robotic process automations (RPAs). The project is the brainchild of Darren Atkins, CTO at East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust (ESNEFT). Atkins spent 18 months working with Thoughtonomy to develop a cloud-based platform that any NHS trust can use to share their existing bots and collaborate on new ones, automating tasks from GP referrals to patient appointment reminders. Read next: How an NHS Trust adopted'virtual workers' to process GP referrals Atkins says this approach allows automated processes to be quickly deployed and will cut costly consultancy companies and other third parties out of the implementation process. All the content on the marketplace is owned by the NHS and can only be used by healthcare organisations for no commercial gain.

Blue Prism yesterday announced the acquisition of Thoughtonomy, a SaaS-based integrated automation platform with Blue Prism RPA baked into its core. After six years and much flirting with potential suitors, Terry Walby's Thoughtonomy successfully exits into the welcoming arms of Blue Prism. This was always the logical end-game for Terry's business, which he bootstrapped from day 1 and tirelessly pushed at the automation world. HFS was particularly inspired with the firms work at the UK's National Health Services (NHS) (which you can read here). Essentially Thoughtonomy is RPA cognitive capabilities cloud.

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.

Thoughtonomy, the leading Intelligent Automation platform provider, today launched a new online portal for its enhanced partner program, as it continues its rapid international growth. The new partner portal provides Thoughtonomy's partners with immediate, 24/7 access to all of its training and enablement materials, including exclusive best practice and marketing resources. By signing up to Thoughtonomy's enhanced partner program and being able to offer clients Thoughtonomy's market-leading Intelligent Automation technology, partners can ensure they have a differentiated offering in one of the fastest-growing, dynamic areas of the technology sector. The program offers a range of benefits to partners, including lead referrals, co-selling assistance, demand generation support, certification training and dedicated account management. In February this year, Thoughtonomy announced that, as part of its strategic growth plan, it was setting out to increase its channel business from 45% of transactions to over 90% in the following 12 months.

Recruiters are using it on their platforms to target the best candidates. Banks have embraced it as a means to identify patterns of behavior that might indicate fraud. Power companies are deploying it to drive energy efficiency. Marketers see it as a way to optimise their campaigns. But if you're company that is selling A.I.- driven solutions.

Imagine having an unlimited pool of office workers that you can train to do any task, across any function at your firm; that would be a valuable way to improve your productivity. Now envision that your resource pool is not human but software, delivered from the cloud to anywhere in the world, 24 hours, 7 days a week, without needing to take a break and never making a mistake. "It's a very futuristic image, but thanks to robotic process automation (RPA) and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies there's nothing visionary about it," said Terry Walby, Chief Executive of London-based Thoughtonomy. Thoughtonomy has created a Virtual Workforce platform that addresses the'productivity of office-based workers' not by replacing employees with virtual ones, but by'automating work' and weeding out inefficiencies in day-to-day workflow processes. Productivity in the UK has dramatically stalled since the financial crisis, growing at a mere average of 0.2 percent since.

The graph represents a network of 2,720 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained "#rpa", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets, taken from a data set limited to a maximum of 18,000 tweets. The network was obtained from Twitter on Tuesday, 13 March 2018 at 22:15 UTC. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 5-day, 13-hour, 51-minute period from Thursday, 08 March 2018 at 08:04 UTC to Tuesday, 13 March 2018 at 21:55 UTC. Additional tweets that were mentioned in this data set were also collected from prior time periods. These tweets may expand the complete time period of the data.