What is Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been the most hyped term in the IT-industry for the last 2 years.

In Right People Group we actually think the hype is exaggerated, if you look at the current hard-core business benefits provided by AI. However, we don’t think AI is overhyped if you look at the business benefits it will bring in the future.

Different authors have compared what electricity was for the 20th century with what AI will be for the 21st century.

We think this comparison is great because electricity has been the foundation for the most ground-breaking progress in the 20th century and, in the same way, we believe that AI will be the foundation for the most ground-breaking innovations in the 21st century.

We believe that AI will be applied in many different variations, and that it will be embedded in almost all advanced products and services in the future.

But before we can understand what Artificial Intelligence will do, we have to understand what it actually means. The below video will give you a better understanding.

Machine learning, deep learning and neural networks

In the current cases where simple AI is providing real business benefits there is very often driven by machine learning.

If you apply machine learning to large amounts of data, you have many and various opportunities to automate and enhance processes. This is why you often talk about Big Data and Artificial Intelligence together.

Watch below video to get a deeper insight in machine learning, deep learning and neural networks:

Getting sufficient amounts of data with an adequate data quality is often a strong barrier for machine learning projects in real-life commercial projects.

Therefore, pay attention to what the cool speaker in the video says about “reinforcement learning”, since here we are not dependent on data in the same way. Recently, exactly this was exposed very clearly when Google’s chess computer “Alfa Zero” crushed the previously best chess computer called “Stockfish”.

Stockfish had chewed through enormous amounts of chess data using very high processing power, where Alfa Zero had no data, but only relied on reinforcement learning. Alfa Zero just knew the chess rules and then played against itself for only 4 hours to reach a level where it was able to defeat Stockfish.

Another perspective on this is that the more rule-driven a process is, the easier it is to automate in general and to fuel with simple AI. Chess is the ultimate rule-driven scenario, but we believe that most jobs in today’s world are actually quite rule-driven…try to think about it.

Python

Python is a simple and very powerful programming language, and we are seeing an increasing demand for Python experts. The best of these are often found in the freelance market.

Python is very suitable for different kinds of machine learning projects, and in general for projects that are very heavy on data and statistical computation.

See the below video to learn more:

RPA (Robotic Process Automation)

The recent year, we have seen companies publicly saying that they “have hired a robot in their team” because they are starting to apply Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

We think these statements are useless and the culmination of the hype for AI. IT has been replacing manual jobs for more than 40 years and this will continue to happen.

At the current stage, Robotic Process Automation is basically advanced macros that can do repetitive and highly rule-driven tasks using the normal user-interface of the systems. We have mostly seen it being used for moving data between systems and, in the most advanced cases, also transforming data based on given rules.

But do we then think RPA is useless? No, not at all.

We love advanced macros and the RPA projects we have been involved in have a very high ROI (return on investment) which is realized fast. With expert freelance consultants that know exactly what to do, you can build working solutions providing high value quickly (often days or weeks).

When you let the use of RPA grow in your organisation, it can also help you to see the gap in your process and system landscape and there by help you to specify the areas, where you want to build more stable integrations in the back-end.

Blue Prism is one of the strong RPA tools, and even though David Moss, the CTO of Blue Prism, is commercially biased, we think he is doing a great and objective job in explaining RPA and Blue Prism in the video below:

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