Generative AI and RPA: Your business needs both

Few industries are growing as fast as high technology. However, even in such an ever-changing world, one law remains constant: yesterday’s “dream” becomes today’s reality.

Nothing illustrates this better than artificial intelligence (AI). New automation technologies that wowed people just a few years ago are now key drivers of business value.

Chatbots facilitate customer service. AIOps tools monitor IT assets. Lightweight low-code and no-code tools automate important parts of application development. All of this speeds up operations, increases productivity and reduces costs.

As the high-tech industry embraces generative AI solutions, it’s easy to forget or even ignore key tools like robotic process automation (RPA) software. This is unwise, and it is unwise to compare generative AI with The combination of efficient tools like RPA may be the most promising to change the business.

Don’t ignore RPA

If you have implemented RPA (Gartner estimates that 90% of enterprises have implemented RPA), you must know that it consists of “robots” or software that automates work . Examples of this include filling forms, scraping data from the web, logging into applications and other mechanical tasks.

It doesn't sound very attractive. However, their power comes from performing repetitive tasks that would otherwise be done by humans, freeing humans to perform other critical tasks. One prominent example is the massive growth in RPA driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused businesses to rush to digitize more business processes.

Like most IT leaders, you probably don’t take these rules-based bots seriously. After all, they aren't as articulate as their other siblings, nor do they have human names; if you talk to them, they don't respond to you. At a grand event, RPA checks guest lists, counts tickets, and monitors things like room capacity, heating and lighting.

Meanwhile, generative AI is creating ads for the event, writing congratulatory messages for winners, and conducting conversations with each user. It uses large language models (LLMs) to take in the vast amounts of available information and create complete text, images, and videos that can be used to generate content. Ask a chatbot powered by generative AI a question and you'll get a detailed answer, and you may even find that its output is surprisingly human-like.

However, the impact of generative AI on businesses—optimists and skeptics alike disagree—ultimately remains to be seen. But RPA has actually created huge business value today.

The automation market is expanding

Gartner estimates that RPA has become a more than $2 billion market over the past few years. According to the research firm, enterprises are likely to triple their RPA capabilities by 2024 as they look to inject more automation into their operations.

Gartner predicts in 2021 that more broadly, the collective market for these automation technologies (RPA, low-code and no-code application platforms, artificial intelligence, and virtual assistants) can help enterprises reduce operating costs by up to 30% .

However, this prediction was published before generative AI solutions became popular. Today, as generative AI solutions mature, enterprises will begin to deploy them. They have the potential to revolutionize the way enterprises automate business processes in a way that no previous tool has been able to do. For example, imagine a line of business creating a range of company materials, including documents and free graphics, for use in sales, marketing, legal and other pursuits. These tools will be widely used across the enterprise, automating processes beyond the reach of even the most powerful army of RPA robots.

Together, however, these tools deliver a powerful combined hit: As generative AI automates and transforms content generation across lines of business, RPA bots will continue to streamline and accelerate repetitive operations, and they will free up humans, to focus on more meaningful work with customers, partners and suppliers.

IT organizations should evolve with the development of RPA and generative AI

It is difficult to predict how IT organizations will change as artificial intelligence tools develop and grow.

But as an IT leader, you know how important it is to leverage every tool at your disposal as you continue to lead digital transformation initiatives. And you also know that deploying new tools requires thoughtful application of people, processes, and technology to be successful.

Therefore, you need to consider how to train and hire IT talent to apply these technologies, and how to spread these technologies throughout the business. You must work with your business peers to develop coding processes for acceptable and appropriate use cases, while ensuring that any AI you choose to use has been reviewed for compliance.

By ensuring that workloads that include automation tools are deployed intentionally, you increase their potential to run efficiently while boosting your business. Finally, whether you choose to embrace the dividends of automation or not, ask yourself: What steps are you taking to help your business unlock value?

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