A breakdown of the latest trends and insights from UiPath’s annual partner conference
Members of the boost.ai team recently attended UiPath FORWARD 5, an annual conference bringing together hundreds of like-minded companies and thought leaders in the automation space for two-and-a-half days of knowledge-sharing and networking.
In addition to manning a booth at the event and getting the opportunity to demo the boost.ai platform to a host of new and interested parties, our team kept an ear to the ground and spoke with other vendors and attendees to form a picture of the trends coming out of the conference that will shape the future of automation going forward.
Automation is evolving
One of the meta trends coming out of the conference centers around the evolution of automation. Large enterprises acknowledge the necessity of automation, with many having already widely adopted some form of the technology across various facets of their business. The piece that still seems to be missing? How to generate long-lasting value from these systems.
As AI adoption continues to rise across all sectors, leveraging the strengths of the various automation systems within an organization to work with (and not against) each other is what will drive genuine return on investment.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and conversational AI are two technologies that, when applied correctly, work hand in hand to enhance existing automation processes and fuel true digital transformation.
A great example of this is how chatbots can act as a dynamic front-end for RPA robots thanks to proprietary Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies. Using conversational AI, a chatbot can intelligently interact with the end user, collect relevant information and documents, and interface with back-end robots to trigger attended or unattended automations. This results in helping to streamline virtually any process without the need to ever involve a human.
This end-to-end automated workflow not only empowers self-service, but comes with a host of tangible benefits including reduced customer effort, increased service quality and overal faster time to value.
Driving efficiencies with RPA
The journey of automation is defined as moving from an ‘informational’ phase of resolving low-level FAQs through to completing ‘transactional’ processes such as blocking a credit card or upgrading a data package, to finally hitting new ‘transformational’ heights with, for example, voice technology.
It was clear at FORWARD 5 that we are still very much on that journey, but a focus on driving business efficiences with RPA is a key step forward. It’s no longer acceptable to invest in AI and automation technologies in the hope that they will produce results somewhere down the line.
Companies are demanding (and rightfully so) justification for investment via clear-cut business cases such as the using RPA and conversational AI to scale customer support during a pandemic, or increasing employee productivity via AI-assisted contact center augmentation.
As an Advanced UiPath Technology Alliance Partner, boost.ai is well positioned to integrate our chat and voicebots with the UiPath RPA platform to help existing UiPath customers accelerate their automation performance and scale up self-service potential.