New World Development Company Limited

Robotics process automation (“RPA”) is a form of business process automation technology that enables organizations to automate highly manual and repetitive tasks through the use of software robots. 

What process should organizations adopt RPA?

RPA can be adopted in various stages in an organization. Firstly, organizations can automate both internal and external processes with the use of RPA. RPA can be used in most departments, especially those that involve repetitive tasks and high-volume data processing which are timing-consuming and require high accuracy. Sales operation like invoice preparation and processing involves data extraction, data replication, and text recognition can be automated. However, organizations should carefully consider the pros and cons before automating internal processes. As this is likely to incur high maintenance costs due to future system enhancement and UI changes. Most organizations adopt RPA to improve efficiency or save cost, but whether adopt RPA or develop technical integration (e.g., API), as technology leaders, we need to judge carefully and strategically. This is not only a technical decision, but also a CAPEX or OPEX, build or operate decision.

How can RPA and AI work together? 

The success of Open AI or Chat-GPT has demonstrated the possibility of how technology boosts efficiency in the next era. We should focus on how RPA can be combined with AI to automate more complicated processes which may involve complicated decision-making and information analytics. 

" Significant evolution is needed for the next gen of RPA, especially since the experience of ChatGPT delivering to the world completely changed people’s expectations of how they should interact with automation tools like RPA "

With the recent launch of AI (co-pilot) enabled Microsoft Office 365 and ChatGPT Plugins, we can expect there will be significant working behavior changes. 

As technology leaders, we need to rethink the position of "automation" because we cannot only automate the operational process but also automate our thinking process through AI.

What is the future of RPA? 

Significant evolution is needed for the next gen of RPA. The experience of ChatGPT delivering to the world also completely changed people’s expectations of how they should interact with automation tools like RPA. Low or No Code is not enough. We would need a human-like interactive capability RPA tool. Ultimately enable all business users can create their automation, especially if they already outsourcing so of their thinking process to AI.