Article for SiliconANGLE by Jason Bloomberg
The rise of robotic process automation in the late 2010s heralded a new era of knowledge work automation. RPA bots could emulate human tasks, completing simple workflows via scripted interactions with user interfaces or application programming interfaces.
Though RPA can save organizations money by replacing repetitive human activity with less expensive bots, it suffered from two core limitations: Bots were brittle and added to the organization’s technical debt.
In response, RPA vendors added AI to their bots, crafting a new “cognitive RPA” market – but it wasn’t enough to address these core challenges.
Gartner responded by positing a new “hyperautomation” category, shifting the spotlight off RPA to combinations of technologies that might address the limitations of RPA.
Then along came large language models that support generative artificial intelligence, disrupting RPA, hyperautomation and the rest of the knowledge work landscape.
It seems that every software vendor must have a gen AI strategy these days, and vendors in the automation segment are no different. Today, however, vendors are moving past early conversational interfaces to deeper applications of this transformative technology.
I spoke with eight of the most innovative vendors in this market – a mere fraction of the crazy number of disruptive forces in the market today, but nevertheless representative of the progress vendors are making in addressing the difficult problems of knowledge work automation.
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This article has also been translated into French, Russian, and Chinese.
