BPA, or Business Process Automation, has been around for a long time. Essentially, it is taking processes that involve paper forms, emails, spreadsheets, and other outdated solutions and moving these to modern, efficient systems. This drives productivity and profitability upward while reducing the drag on employee performance.
But now, with the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, businesses need to move to iBPA – intelligent Business Process Automation. Normal BPA will not suffice for much longer. AI components – OpenAI, ChatGPT, Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, Image Processing, and more – need to be incorporated into processes in every organization.
That is why we are now calling BPA “iBPA”. The simple formula is: BPA + AI = iBPA. This will be the new model for process automation going forward.
What does AI bring to BPA to turn it into iBPA? A lot:
- ChatGPT Plugins using Enterprise Data. ChatGPT 3.5, 4.0, and others use data from the web. However, ChatGPT plugins can be configured to use data that is specific to an organization (“Enterprise Data”). Using the power of ChatGPT along with the organization’s own data opens up a world of possibility.
HR FAQs, Policy and Procedures, Documents, PDFs, Databases, and just about any other enterprise information can be queried with GPT prompts. The results will be displayed not as a list of search results, but as a synthesis of information, with citations, that gives the user a practical, usable summary. If you have used ChatGPT on the OpenAI site or have watched videos on this, you know how much more useful this type of output is versus the normal list of results.
- Co-Pilots. Microsoft has come out with a number of Co-Pilots for its applications. The same techniques can be applied to third-party business process applications. With Co-Pilots, users can ask the application to perform functions using natural language. For example, the user could prompt a Help Desk application with “Build a bar chart on staff workload” and it would produce a graph with that information. Many other application functions can be automated in this way.
- Auto-generation of Responses. When a user or customer sends in a text, email, or chat message, AI can be used to auto-generate a response. The AI can “contextualize” the response, meaning that if the system can identify the user, it can pull up information relevant to the question and use that in the response.
For a customer, the AI could reference the customer’s Order History. An example would be when a customer asks about details on “a sleeping bag”, the system knows from the customer’s previous orders which sleeping bag that is. For employees, the AI might look up what assets are assigned to them, what projects they are working on, and who their colleagues are.
Using information gleaned from a variety of systems, the AI can craft responses that are accurate and appropriate and thereby save substantial staff time.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand user input. For instance, in a Knowledge Base search, the user can use normal phrases and questions such as “How do I fix my printer?” The user does not have to enter specific keywords (“printer” “broken”) to get results.
- Sentiment Analysis. NLP can be used to assess the underlying “sentiment” of an incoming email, text, or web form. The level of anger, frustration, and negativity, (or, on other hand, the positivity) in the language can be determined and used to trigger a workflow (“User sent an email that seems angry. Raise priority and alert manager”, for example.)
These are just a few of the many possibilities opening up as you move from BPA to iBPA. We can easily say we are in the first inning of the AI revolution. In the near future, these capabilities will grow and expand in ways we can’t quite perceive now.
It is much like when the World Wide Web first came out. What seemed at first like a simple information sharing system morphed into a major influence on our society through social media, e-commerce, video sites, and much more. Inevitably, AI will have at least this much impact on society, if not more.
The time is now to jump on the iBPA train. Get in touch with us and find out how our “NITRO Intelligence Platform” can accelerate your move to intelligent Business Process Automation!
