Robotic Process Automation - A Disruptor

Sometimes change comes into our lives in subtle ways. What looks innocuous at times has the potential to cause revolutionary change or disruptions in the order of the world.

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is one such process which has the potential to make us relook at the way we do our work. RPA is  the use of software along with artificial intelligence to automate high volume repetitive tasks. To give an example, Scrutinizing resumes from hundreds of applicants and categorizing them according to qualifications, experience and skill is one such task which humans are doing today. This is a repetitive task which has the potential to be automated. A robot when programmed to do this same task will do it faster and without errors as it is found. Robots do not make mistakes, nor does a robot suffer from fatigue which reduces human efficiency.

RPA is a logical progression of process automation which gave us the robots doing all the repetitive and risky tasks on a assembly line. Welding, handling heavy equipment like pneumatic tools. Every industry today needs to handle some kind of repetitive task. In the financial services industry companies can use RPA for foreign exchange payments by keeping track of daily exchange rates, opening and closing of accounts etc. The healthcare industry can use RPA for maintaining patient records, This technology has been found to be most suitable for the BPO(Business Process Outsourcing) industry where a lot of repetitive jobs are done. RPA software robots are said to be 50 percent cheaper than an offshore worker. This is significant considering that a lot of BPO jobs today are outsourced from high cost economies to places where labor is cheap.

RPA technology mimics humans closely. Based on the kind of tasks performed, the technology is roughly divided into three categories. Robots (Bots) do these tasks.  The very basic tasks which just need some rules to be followed  is done by Probots. (egg. separating male and female applications). Knowbots are used for tasks which require a little more intelligence like collecting similar entities in different data and write a new database.  Then there are Chatbots which use voice in real time. These robots use NLP (Natural Language Processing) and other high level  algorithms to talk with customers and solve repeated queries. The good thing about RPA technology is that it sits on top of the basic IT infrastructure of any company. It is not an integral part of it. This makes it very cost effective as the company does not need to change or modify any systems in order to implement the automation. Most often it just replaces the current doer of the task, namely, the human entity.

However like all technologies there is a downside to this as well. A recent KPMG report  said that rapidly rising cost of labor is making the whole BPO option unviable. With drastic reduction in processing costs due to RPA technology, the very logic of outsourcing this work to a BPO company is being questioned. With reduced costs, it is argued,  that the companies themselves will now be able to do this work in-house without spending too much. Also since technology is never static, the robots will get more intelligent. This will have a huge impact on the labor market worldwide. Human labor will find itself being replaced by intelligent robots in all spheres of human activity.  There is supposed to be a upside to this disruption. Though automation software is expected to replace up to 140 million full-time employees worldwide by 2025, many high-quality jobs will be created for those who maintain and improve RPA software. This will require reskilling of huge chunk of  the displaced labor force. However, question is how many of the displaced workers will have the capacity to learn the new skills. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Whichever way we look at it,  RPA is here to stay. It can only grow from here. There is no going back. Industry and labor will have to adapt itself to this new technology.

Like most human innovations Robotic Process Outsourcing could be a mixed blessing. It has the potential to revolutionize the industry by reducing costs and increasing efficiencies, but also raise new questions regarding displacement of labor and the problems it entails.

.