Welcoming new digital colleagues to the workforce

The digital transformation of Indian society is happening at a faster pace than ever before, and businesses across all industries are finding it hard to keep up. Covid-19 has forced a new way of working, leading almost every organisation to re-structure their business models so that they can effectively operate in a climate of uncertainty.

Business leaders are now realising that there is a major gap that needs filling – immediately. In all sectors, across all industries, people and technology are increasingly unable to meet the demand surges of operations at the pace required. Simply put, the current way of working is not – in fact – working. A new solution is needed.

It’s time to call in the help of digital team members!

What is a digital team member?

Robotic process automation (RPA) technology is what I mean when talking about bringing in digital team members. This type of platform runs a digital workforce of intelligent software robots that collaborate with human workers to do much more than they normally would while working. This means working faster and more accurately than before — without breaks or distractions.

This is what ‘operational agility’ is, at its finest. Digital workers are able to meet demands that traditional technology and people can’t.

Digital workers perform activities in the same way as humans would. However, these workers are pre-built with autonomous processing capabilities – meaning they are built to allow business users to train them to then work independently.

A digital team member is capable of automating processes over any past, present and future application as they uniquely use and access the same IT systems and mechanisms as humans, without APIs. These unique ‘universal interoperability’ capabilities mean that digital workers can enable operations teams to test and deploy any current or future technology innovation.

These days, RPA technology is built to replicate human decision-making and continue evolving through intelligent automation, RPA fuelled with artificial intelligence capabilities such as machine learning (ML) and optical character recognition (OCR). What this means, in practice, is developing capabilities that enable digital workers to learn, collaborate, plan and problem solve – amongst other things. Then, these capabilities can be further augmented with advances in AI, cognitive and other technologies.

Can digital team members actually “think”?

A digital team member can collect data from various sources, understand it and deliver previously unattainable insights. For organisations, in practice this might mean being able to better understand the customer behaviour and deploy new programs that enhance the customer journey.

Digital workers are increasingly able to read, understand and contextualise visual information digitally, using optical character recognition to work with text just like humans and use natural language processing to understand and interpret human language. Not only can they derive contextual meaning from datasets, they can also recognise process and workflow changes, while adapting accordingly without human intervention, to “learn” without being programmed.

When it comes to workflow and workload execution, digital workers can organise themselves to deliver the best outcomes instantaneously and quickly auto-scale as needed to meet changing business situations. Problem solving that involves logic isn’t an issue either. They can do so without intervention and actually increase productivity throughout the value chain too.

So, how do “we” collaborate with “them”?

It’s fairly simple - digital workers can communicate and complete tasks with people, systems and other digital workers, to reduce time to service customers and improve overall quality.

They also possess business-led, no-code, centralised design principles making them easy to use and integrate into existing enterprise systems. In fact, digital workers automate in an enterprise-friendly way, either autonomously or by interacting with human users through work queues. An example of this is chatbots, which can be deployed to work with digital workers to autonomously service customers, and when needed, escalate actions to human workers.

With fresh challenges facing Indian organisations, it’s time we look at different solutions that don’t put additional stress on our already over-stretched workforces. The 21st century Indian workforce will look different, sooner rather than later. It’s time to start welcoming new digital workmates, while retaining the best of what’s distinctly human too.

The author is Managing Director and President, India, Blue Prism

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