Hyperautomation — The next big thing in Tech in 2021

Hyperautomation has opened doors to provide solutions to the new challenges with RPA and RDA technologies. The concept of hyper-automation combines Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). It gives end-to-end automation capabilities and enables complete digitization with the tools provided by different RPA vendors to effectively automate complex processes.

Major RPA vendors have now enhanced the capabilities of their RPA tools to provide features for Hyperautomation. AI & ML are very specialized subject areas, blending them with RPA solutions is never easy without any tools. There is a good learning curve to understand the subject and technologies that facilitate the implementation. Thanks to the major players in RPA, to name a few, UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere provides a set of tools for Hyperautomation.

Many organizations have already started their automation journey with RPA to initiate digitization efforts on their side. To meet their growing automation needs, they are expanding their automation capabilities with artificial intelligence, machine learning, process mining, analytics, and natural language processing. The thought process has changed in recent years to not just automate but take advantage of available technologies to get the true benefit and leverage the potential to the maximum extent.

How is the automation paradigm-changing with Hyperautomation?

With the challenges and increasing requirements of digital transformation, enterprises are looking forward to optimizing their business processes, improve customer experience and increase overall profitability. Organizations are willing to automate not only rule-based but knowledge-based work but use scientific methods like process mining and analytics to expand automation capabilities.

Here are some of the capabilities expected out of Hyper automation solutions:

• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• Processing structured and handwritten documents — Intelligent document processing
• AI vision

With the above capabilities, RPA tools provide abilities to facilitate process discovery with automated tools and analyze how processes are carried out in the organization, and tasks are performed. Process mining tools facilitate spotting the right processes for automation. These tools also offer the ability to involve employees in the organization who perform these processes on a day-to-day basis, including subject matter experts and business users. Thus, everyone in the organization can participate by bringing up the processes that need to be automated, not just the software development team. Hyperautomation thus helps organizations to develop and scale automation enterprise-wide with accuracy, speed, and cognitive capabilities.

In my experience working with organizations, I frequently come across scenarios where companies are looking forward to developing applications for their needs and RPA tools appear to be the right fit. The license cost is often seen as an issue with these organizations to start their RPA journey as they are looking forward to limited use of the tools. I am sure that RPA vendors are aware of these scenarios and would come up with a solution and affordable licensing cost, based on the number of use cases.

Conclusion:

Enterprises are now thinking way beyond task automation and looking forward to implementing sophisticated and complex business processes. RPA is turning into Hyperautomation to develop scalable digital skills and capacity for organizations. Bots can produce digital hours and thus increase the efficiency of operations. As per Gartner, Hyperautomation is one of the top 10 strategic technology trends of the year.