RPA and AI — A comparative study
Today’s business environment is quite challenging. Technologies are growing at a rapid pace, and there are lots of jargon terms in use which can confuse many of us. The two terms in particular, that is causing confusion in leading sectors — RPA and AI. Some users have the impression that these two things are the same. To get a clear vision on these industrial terms and to know how they can help your business to grow, let us look at what these two terms really mean.
What is RPA? & what is AI?
We cannot address the difference between RPA and AI without knowing what these terms exactly mean so let us take a look at RPA first:
RPA or Robotic Process Automation is a software robot that is built to mimic human activities in day to day repetitive office tasks. The software consists of the predefined set of business rules so to autonomously execute a combination of activities, transactions, tasks and business processes across software systems to deliver the desired result without the human intervention. RPA is practically a software that reduces human efforts.
Let us see how is this different from AI?
AI or Artificial Intelligence refers to the machines that are designed to simulate human emotions, judgment, and behavior. The software is a combination of cognitive automation with machine learning, language processing, hypothesis generation, analysis, and algorithm mutation to produce analytics and insights so to match the human’s capability or to excel beyond it.
How RPA is different from AI?
While designing a business function we need to assign roles than RPA would be the “doer” while AI would be the “thinker”. As discussed above RPA is a robot that mimics human functions and will do only what it’s told to do and doesn’t have the capability to think on his own else. AI, on the other hand, is all about analyzing data stacks and processing them using its intelligence. In a business process, RPA would be the perfect option for filling the data into forms and you might need AI in order to differentiate which data needs to go where on the form. This collaboration of RPA & AI to accomplish the task is called Automation Continuum.
When it comes to actually implementing them, RPA has the advantage over AI, as AI needs a lot of work to be done before it starts running. RPA is simply implemented using a relatively simple user interface and some time spent on thinking set of rules to accomplish the desired task. Whereas AI implementation requires some specialized knowledge, and it will need a fair amount of high-quality data to train the bot.
The Future of RPA & AI
The difference between these two technologies clearly states AI is way ahead in the league compared to RPA. What if we use them simultaneously to plan the business process for day to day work? A combination of these two technologies has the capability to take things to the very next level.
The speed at which RPA and AI are evolving, the market looks much brighter for the coming years. Even the giant firms are tapping more and more to RPA & AI. The idea of Automation Continuum is gaining popularity among organizations. Even the Entrepreneurs are seeing it attractive and are investing in these technologies. The industry is witnessing their capabilities — AI can read, listen and analyze the data that need to be fed to RPA bots. At the end of the day, RPA and AI are two valuable technology that helps organizations in digital transformation.
