One thing that goes hand-in-hand with robotic process automation (RPA) is intelligent automation (IA). RPA and IA are incredibly useful for businesses because they can help them become more efficient. This post will go into detail about IA to help you get a better understanding of what it is and how it could help you and your business.

Intelligent automation takes RPA and combines it with other technologies like analytics, optical character recognition, intelligent character recognition, process mining, and artificial intelligence. This creates processes for businesses that can think, learn new processes, and adapt to changes without human aid.

If you are unfamiliar with RPA, an explanation of it can help you better understand intelligent automation. Robotic process automation has grown in popularity over the last few years but has been around for decades. RPA allows a business to automate processes within the business that are mundane or pull attention away from more important matters. These tasks can be taught to bots that are developed through a visual design interface. This interface gives the bots knowledge of the business process that you want to be automated, allowing them to follow specific rules and make decisions. A good example of this would be a company adding the emails of new customers who create accounts on their website to their weekly newsletter. Instead of having someone manually select the customers’ emails to add to the newsletter, you could teach bots to process different emails and add them to the newsletter on their own.

RPA doesn’t require skilled programmers to get it working with other systems. In fact, RPA doesn’t require programmers at all. The user interface allows you to train the bots on your own so that they know how to complete the business process as a human would. But RPA can only cover so many tasks, and even though they may be considered mundane, some of the processes can be more complicated than others. That’s where intelligent automation comes into play.

Intelligent automation is sometimes referred to as hyperautomation. It layers other technologies into RPA to give it a sharper edge than it already had. Business management tools (optical character recognition, intelligent character recognition, etc.) along with artificial intelligence create a more intelligent form of automation. This allows more processes to be automated and further integrated with other systems. Intelligent automation completely automates the workflow of a process, bringing different systems together while automated tasks and human tasks are completed side by side.