- Intelligent automation can take on mundane, repetitive tasks, freeing up workers to take on more creative elements of their work.
- From procurement to healthcare and transportation, the potential applications for intelligent automation are wide-ranging.
- Pascal Bornet, an expert in the field, explains why automation won’t replace all jobs and 5 critical steps to achieve intelligent automation at scale.
Pascal Bornet is a pioneer and expert in the field of intelligent automation – also known as cognitive or hyperautomation. He spoke to the World Economic Forum about the technology and his passion for making our world more human using intelligent automation.
An edited transcript of that conversation follows below.
What is intelligent automation?
Intelligent automation is a combination of methods involving people, organizations and also technologies involving machine learning. Intelligent automation is aimed at automating end-to-end business processes on computers. It delivers business outcomes on behalf of the employees working hand-in-hand with them to deliver faster, better, cheaper services. This improves not only the employee experience, but also the customer experience.
When I explain what intelligent automation is, I like to share an example. All companies around the world are performing an end-to-end process, which we call ‘procure-to-pay’ (PTP), which is about procuring goods and services from vendors. Intelligent automation will help, first of all, to select the vendors using machine learning. And then it’s about sending orders to those vendors and how we will leverage workflow platforms, for example.
And then it’s about receiving and processing invoices after the services or goods have been received – and this can be done using natural language processing. And finally, the payment to those vendors. It’s quite systematic and can be done using robotic process automation.