https://youtu.be/Z7roIa12cmI
“Before long, most companies will have robotic assistants and will be working with them,” said Walter Soriano, an expert in technology project management and leadership, during the conference “The Importance of RPA in Today’s World,” which he delivered alongside Pablo Moyal, MBA, a partner at the audit and consulting firm Crowe, who heads the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) consulting and implementation division.
The event was organized by the Department of Short-Term Programs at the School of Administration and Social Sciences of Universidad ORT Uruguay took place on Thursday, November 4, 2021, via Zoom.
Between Prejudice and the Accessibility of RPA
Moyal began by dispelling the misconception that robotization involves large robots working in factories, explaining that RPA consists of automating processes using software. “It’s about automating administrative processes. In these processes, what is handled and managed is information.”
According to Gartner studies, by 2022, 85% of large organizations worldwide will have implemented RPA, and by 2025, 40% of manual processes will have been automated. In Moyal’s view, the adoption of RPA is growing at a faster rate than the estimates suggest.
The goal here is to allow people to spend their time on higher-value tasks rather than repetitive ones.
Moyal.
Automation is nothing new. It is already present in corporate systems and processes. However, RPA provides a tool that has become much more widespread and accessible in recent years.
Advantages, Interfaces, and Automation
Experts believe that implementing RPA offers significant advantages. Moyal listed a few: increased efficiency and productivity, error-free service 24 hours a day, rapid data processing, improved response times, and information traceability.
“Robotics interacts through the user interface,” explained the expert. This means that the software will use the same systems and screens as the users who typically perform the tasks to be automated. “To connect information from different systems, we won’t need to develop new technology interfaces,” he added.
The expert explained that RPA is not intended to replace all manual work; rather, every process must be evaluated. For a task to be “robotizable,” it must consist of repetitive, highly manual, rule-based processes that involve interaction with multiple systems and are high-value.
The Disruptive Impact of Robotization and Success Stories
Soriano wondered why automation will be disruptive in the labor market. This disruption is taking place against the backdrop of the convergence of computer science, neuroscience, computing power, and data.
“These different theoretical, scientific, and technological frameworks, which once seemed to have little in common, are now feeding into one another.”
“There are currently fields, such as computational cognitive neuroscience, that combine neuroscience with mathematics and computer science in order to build explanatory models of complex functions, such as language,” Soriano explained.
In another part of the event, the speaker shared a case study of the application of a “distance algorithm”—also known as text mining—in which the robot is trained to recognize similarities and differences. The example involved “a robot equipped with an artificial intelligence layer and inductive algorithms that learns from context,” said Soriano.
The Future
Soriano addressed a common fear when discussing automation: the loss of human jobs. “Our experience is that itgenerally doesn’t take away jobs—it increases productivity,” he said, adding that “tasks are automated, not people.” “Not everything can be automated, and not everything is worth automating,” he explained.
He believes, however, that the fear of being replaced is a natural emotion and that it is important to understand what these tools can and cannot do in order to act with full knowledge of the facts. He also said that these changes will create new job opportunities in the short term.
AI robot trainers, workflow designers: these are new roles and new job profiles that will start appearing in the very near future, because this isn’t something that will take 10 years. It’s happening right now.
Soriano.
“Before long, most companies will have robotic assistants and will be working with them.”
professional development familiarity with these types of tools represent a career opportunity for anyone who wants to stay competitive in the job market,” he concluded.