What is Intelligent Automation?

Intelligent automation (IA) is the process of using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) to create complex software automation. RPA is a software technology that automates repetitive, rule-based, and labor-intensive back-office workflows such as filling in forms, searching for information, or sorting invoices. RPA uses software robots to perform similar tasks to humans within digital systems. Intelligent automation technologies make RPA bots smarter to handle unstructured data, unknown variables and rules, and more complex tasks and use cases. Intelligent automation combines AI technologies like natural language processing (NLP), generative AI, and optical character recognition (OCR) to process unstructured data and act in more complex ways.

Intelligent automation uses machine learning (ML) and other cognitive technologies to collect, process, and analyze data. Intelligent automation can use this data to suggest data-driven insights to your business operations, to make informed and strategic decisions. Over time, the repeated use of data-driven decision-making can streamline many business processes.

IA also has several customer-facing benefits. With complex automatic responses, chatbots, and highly personalized recommendations, IA can provide 24/7 support to your customers and use customer data to provide a better user experience.

IA allows businesses to reduce the manual time spent on repetitive business processes and reduce human errors. With less human input, companies save time and money, decrease resource expenditure, and enhance workflows.

Intelligent automation chains multiple automations and can perform complex processes, with numerous applications in various industries.

Business processes

Business process automation reduces manual work and streamlines current workflows. It increases operational efficiency across data entry, financial logging, and even supply chain management. You can scale existing processes without needing to expand your workforce, which helps to increase the overall efficiency of your business. Intelligent process automation can remove some instances of human error, which saves resources and increases cost savings in the workplace.

Customer services

IA can help to create a positive customer experience and foster loyalty across domains such as retail, healthcare, marketing, sales, and finance. For example, IA can automatically update appointment forms, send reminders, automate scheduling, and give real-time updates. You can analyze the customer data collected by intelligent automation tools and offer data-driven methods of tailoring the customer experience.

Business planning

In business intelligence, research, and data analytics fields, intelligent process automation helps to drive growth, future thinking, and strategic positioning. Intelligent automation has the potential to track repetitive tasks and locate unproductive areas. By automating task workflows that take too much time in a business, you can reallocate employee time for more important matters. Employees can spend more time focusing on innovation and strategic thinking tasks. With many manual tasks done by IA, you can create a culture of continuous improvement.

Intelligent automation involves a series of software processes that work collaboratively to optimize workflows. Several technologies work together to facilitate the process.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that solves cognitive problems typically linked to human intelligence. AI is a broad field that encompasses other technologies like ML and deep learning.

Traditional automation tools can run predefined tasks. With AI, automation systems can make complex automation decisions from data and user interactions. With self-learning automation AI, when you give the tools more inputs and provide feedback based on the outputs, you expand the automation's abilities. For example, an ML-based automation with memory can recognize patterns and then use those skills to solve new problems. This is particularly useful in environments that are dynamic and change over time.

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Machine learning

Machine learning (ML) is the science of using statistical models and algorithms, so machines perform tasks without specifically programming each task. By using patterns, historical data, and inference, machines predict outcomes and act upon them.

ML algorithms use large volumes of historical data to train the IA on inputs and outputs. With less human intervention, intelligent automation can develop more precise and efficient workflows as it processes more data.

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Natural language processing

Natural language processing (NLP) is a technology that allows computers to interpret and understand human language. You can input text data like social media posts, emails, and texts into NLP software. NLP in intelligent automation improves the automated analysis of large text-based documents. Automation tools can also process customer engagement metrics in a better way, to enhance user experience.

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Computer vision

Computer vision software identifies people, things, and places in images. It helps automate image extraction, identification, and classification. For example, you can rapidly upload an image library to gain a method of effectively detecting scenes, faces, and objects.

Computer vision technology can ingest a continual stream of new images and objects into your automation system. You can use computer vision to build IA systems in fields such as medical imaging, manufacturing process control, and autonomous driving.

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Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition converts images of text into machine-readable text. It can process these images very quickly. OCR allows the automation system to act upon information otherwise locked away in image files.

Because of OCR, you can integrate images of scanned physical documents into your business process management. For example, you can include hand-filled reports, forms, legal documents, and hand-written notes in business workflows.

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Robotic process automation and intelligent automation both refer to the process of automating repetitive tasks with software. However, RPA is a traditional automation technology.

To perform RPA, in some instances, users recorded the tasks and the software copied the recording. For instance, the user could record a task. They could open a folder, open a file, copy the data into another system, then close the file. Then, RPA could repeat the same process at scale to optimize business processes. In other RPA instances, users built complex workflows from pre-coded scripts addressing multiple tools, which were then conjoined in a single software.

Cognitive automation (CA) is a step up from robotic process automation. Cognitive automation applies machine learning techniques to specific problems, such as document understanding.

Intelligent automation solutions are the upgrade to RPA and CA, incorporating AI technologies to automate workflows and perform more complex processes. It uses advanced technologies so RPA can automate increasingly complex tasks with minimum human intervention to enhance efficiency. In self-learning instances, IA can learn and improve over time. For example, IA automation solutions can extract relevant data from scanned invoices. Over time, it learns the frequent invoice templates your organization uses and gets faster and more accurate at data extraction.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has many offerings to support your work with IA. Artificial Intelligence on AWS details a range of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) services that you can integrate into your automation workflows.

For example, here are some AWS offerings for enterprise intelligent automation you can use:

• Amazon Personalize to deploy hyper-personalized user recommendations across websites, apps, and marketing channels at scale with ultra-low latency
• Amazon Rekognition to automate image recognition and video analysis tasks
• Amazon Textract for intelligent document processing, to automatically extract printed text, handwriting, and data from any document

You can integrate these and many other AI/ML services with AWS Step Functions. Step Functions is a visual workflow service that helps developers use AWS services to build distributed applications, automate processes, orchestrate microservices, and create data pipelines at scale. This solution allows you to process data on demand, visualize new workflows, and automate existing ones for customized intelligent automation.

Alternatively, you can browse the AWS Marketplace and choose from hundreds of existing and customizable IA solutions for a range of use cases.

Get started with intelligent automation on AWS by creating a free account today.