UiPath Inc. is a top-tier automation company and one of our partners here at Digital Workforce Solutions. At the beginning of August, the automation company said it acquired the artificial intelligence startup known as Re:infer Ltd. This business move comes from employers that are concerned about a recession and looking to cut costs through further automation of more workplace tasks.
Created in London, Re:infer offers a natural-language processing software that is designed to identify and pull data from a wide range of interactions that a customer has with a business. Some of this data includes emails, online chats, and voice messages. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
UiPath’s executive vice president of products and engineering Ted Kummert stated that “Once you analyze communications data, you want to automate around it.” This includes the creation of apps that can respond to customer emails, send them to the correct division of the corporation, troubleshoot account issues, or tweak orders, billing, and deliveries without the need for human intervention.
Kummert also notes that Re:infer’s natural-language processing tools are perfect for call centers and customer service departments, but they have more uses too. He says that these tools can be used for daily communications between internal business units, the automation of tracking tasks, cataloging, and the organization of information in real-time. Re:infer was founded in 2015, and the company has said that it has received more than $7.5 million in investor funding.
Re:infer’s natural-language processing tools also have broad applications for sectors like banking, healthcare, insurance, retail, manufacturing, and transportation. All of these industries have large amounts of data that cannot be optimized because of their bandwidth constraints.
Since the start of the pandemic, chief information officers and corporate tech leaders increased their usage of AI-powered software automation which is also known as robotic process automation (RPA). This kind of automation was designed to take over mundane and repetitive tasks so that human workers can focus on more important tasks.
These tools are set to see far more use as companies look for ways to improve efficiency due as concerns about a US economic recession are debated by industry analysts. Many CIOs claim that tough economic conditions create an increased need for software automation because it can pick up the slack caused by spending cuts and hiring freezes.
Earlier this year, UiPath launched its corporate automation advisory group comprised of IT leaders from Xerox Holdings Corp. and Intuit Inc. According to UiPath, the group was formed to identify any gaps in a business’s automation applications. As of last year, UiPath had around a 34% share of the global software automation market, so stay on the lookout for more UiPath acquisitions in the future.
