What is cognitive automation and how can it transform your company?

Twenty years ago, desks were piled high with files to process. Landline phones rang off the hook. Paper memos traveled throughout departments. Workers spent hours inputting data. But that all started to change at the turn of the millennium — not just because of the growing popularity of email.

Business automation technology entered the market in the early 2000s, quickly helping workers cut the most mundane and boring parts of their jobs. Robotic process automation (RPA) leveraged software to complete simple, rules-based tasks on computers without the need for human input. Optical character recognition (OCR) technology converted scanned documents into editable text.

More recently, artificial intelligence has helped reduce the labor of setting up and managing RPA and OCR by aiding in basic data analysis. AI is becoming increasingly powerful with investment from the U.S. government and growing by almost 200% from 2015 to 2019. As the technology advances, it’s bringing together RPA, OCR, and other features to create a new kind of automation.

What is cognitive automation?

Cognitive automation is a subset of AI tech that can mimic human behavior. It allows computers to automate tasks involving perception and judgment that previously only humans were capable of. We’re still far (far) away from having freely thinking machines, but research is already producing machine capabilities that help businesses automate more work and streamline the tasks employees are left with.

The benefits of cognitive automation

We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of cognitive automation’s full potential, but AI in enterprise automation technology is already impacting business processes. Here’s how cognitive automation is transforming companies today:

Make greater impact with less data

Before advanced AI, users had to manually script and test workflows hundreds of times to achieve the desired results or diligently train models to execute processes confidently. Cognitive automation platforms need less data from training for creating effective workflows — and they continue to learn and improve as they go along.

Many cognitive automation tools actually come “pre-trained” based on collective process data, and quickly adjust to individual organizations. Workers can also use process data from their other automation systems for even faster set up.

Minimize “mental labor” to improve efficiency

Cognitive automation is always learning. Every time a cognitive automation tool completes a task, it compares and contrasts the experience to previous documents it’s processed and the other times it did the same type of work. To build these relationships, it analyzes information such as where and how information is repeated across documents, how tasks are connected to each other, and even how relevant these connections are.

Tracking and analyzing this type of information can be a huge relief for workers used to serving as the “brain” for legacy RPA systems. In addition to saving time, cognitive automation also frees up mental and emotional energy that workers can direct to more essential duties.

Supercharge business processes

Before AI, RPA and OCR programs were standalone systems that required users to port data between them to activate workflows. Now, intelligent automation platforms with OCR and RPA capabilities can actually replace other systems.

For users who want to improve their current systems, cognitive automation tools seamlessly integrate with standalone tools to create more cohesive workflows without the need for human input. This type of integration reduces bottlenecks for further efficiency and less resource consumption.

Analyze data to refine operations

When connected to other systems, cognitive automation platforms also track process data and look for ways to improve performance. As it completes more work and is able to compare and contrast various experiences, cognitive automation can eventually identify ways to improve workflows and suggest them to users.

True cognitive automation is still in the distant future. But as AI is implemented in more organizations, the speed at which it can learn more advanced capabilities increases exponentially.