Age of Intelligent Robots Approaching

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that when my 13-year old son and his friends were insulting each other, they used the term "bots." I thought this was interesting, because in our industry, we have typically  considered bots to be a good thing -as in you can deploy "a bot" to automate a process. In fact, the rapidly growing billion-dollar RPA industry has been built on bots.

I asked, "Why do you call each other bots as a put down?"

"Because in video games when you play against the computer, even the highest level is dumber than playing against the worst real person," my son answered . "You're playing against a bunch of 'bots.'"

That made perfect sense to me. In fact, a few months back, I realized that despite many people thinking that robots are intelligent, the way they have been deployed in RPA doesn't really manifest that. Sure, RPA 'bots' can copy repetitive human tasks, but when it comes to anything outside of that, well that just hasn't been happening. And it seemed to me that the promise of RPA (especially as it has risen in parallel with AI) is that is should be more intelligent.

Well, this seems to be on the minds of RPA vendors as well. In a recent interview I did with Chad Gailey, VP, channels and ISV partners, Americas, for RPA market leader Blue Prism, he said, "RPA is today, but it’s really simple processing. The future is leveraging machine learning and computer algorithms to mimic and behave in a human manner. We want to infuse vision from AI and cognitive learning platforms into our RPA software to move to our next generation."

Then, a couple weeks later, we found ourselves interviewing Kashif Mahbub, VP, product marketing and global head, RPA for another market leader, Automation Anywhere. He was briefing us on Automation Anywhere Enterprise A2019, the ISV's next-generation RPA platform.  It includes, "infused AI skills and capabilities throughout the platform."

So, RPA is getting more intelligent. Interestingly, document capture has already embraced AI. As their ability to capture data from structured documents became commoditized, document capture vendors introduced AI to help them deal with capture from a wider variety for forms. For some RPA vendors, capture has actually been their first step towards "cognitive automation." Automation Anywhere, for example, markets a product called "IQ Bot" that was presented to me at AIIM as a document capture platform.

So, it seems that as RPA moves toward intelligent automation, there are even more synergies with capture that can be realized. In addition, workflow vendors like Hyland are also looking to leverage AI to automate more processes within their platform, which should definitely create some more crossover and possible synergies with RPA.

We know one thing: that RPA leaders like Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath certainly have a lot of funding to invest in AI technology if they choose to, and it sounds like they are choosing to. There seems to be a bit of an intelligent automation arms race beginning - as part of the larger Digital Transformation market as whole. And as AI more deeply enters into this fray, maybe the idea of "dumb bots" will become archaic. In fact, there is already a well known story about an AI program that beat a champion of the Chinese board game "go." Wait 'til Madden gets ahold of that technology. Thirteen-year-olds will have to most certainly adjust their lexicons and come up with a new insult for dumb. Perhaps something like "paper user," will be in vogue next.

Capture and RPA: Who's the Horse and Who's the Cart?

Is document capture a subset of Robotics Process Automation (RPA) or vice-versa? This question came up at the recent Harvey Spencer Associates Capture Conference - an annual meeting of top executives in the document capture software industry. HSA's Mike Spang presented RPA as a $200 million-plus branch of the $4.1 billion capture industry. That said, by our calculations, just three of the market leading RPA companies, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, have a combined market capitalization of $4.4 billion, or more than the whole capture market is producing annually in revenue.

And most accounts we hear have RPA implementations pulling through capture sales when the processes being roboticized run into documents, which seems to be a considerable amount of the time. Earlier this year, Boris Krumrey, the Chief Robotics Officer for UiPath, estimated that about 70% of the RPA vendor's 700 customers were likely candidates for capture. UiPath has a partnership with ABBYY to provide these services and was looking to partner with other capture ISVs as well.

It's also been conjectured by no less than Reynolds Bish, CEO of Kofax (which offers both capture and RPA technology) that there is opportunity for BPA/workflow/case management integration with RPA for better managing processes where human intervention is required. So, there seems to be quite a bit of synergy between the RPA and ECM markets. Going one step further, recently ECM vendors Digitech and Hyland have each announced RPA initiatives that seem to primarily built around automating the entry of information from their applications into third-party applications. So, in these cases ECM is pulling through RPA!

This whole situation kind of reminds me of the Web Content Management vs. ECM division we dealt with around the turn of the century. At that time, I remember there was talk of WCM leader Vignette merging with ECM leader FileNet. There was a similar disparity between market caps and revenue (FileNet with the higher revenues but much lower multiple) to what you are currently seeing with RPA and capture. FileNet (and CEO Lee Roberts) could not come to grips with this disparity and thus never consummated the merger. Not too much later, in 2001, the Web technology bubble burst and Vignette was eventually sold to OpenText in 2009.

I'm not saying the RPA technology bubble is going to burst, but Digitech CEO H.K. Bain recently told me that he felt the development of RPA was a step back from the advanced technology his company was working on related to information management. So, what's it going to be? Are capture ISVs going to be acquired by/merge with RPA companies while their valuation is high? Or, are the ECM companies going to wait it out and see if they can catch the RPA vendors on their way down?

Adding Substance to the Style in the Age of Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation sounds sexy. It’s about taking all your manual and paper processes and making them faster and electronic. The impetus behind this transformation is that everybody is connected today, though wi-fi, satellite networks, mobile devices, and even laptops and PCs. A lot of work has been spent on enabling the UIs on these devices to help users to have a top notch digital experience. However, it seems that back-end systems, where information coming in from these UIs is processed, are still not up to speed. At least this is what we were told when putting together stories for our last [Jan. 26] issue. 

“A lot of companies have mobile apps and digital interfaces, and they are very fast at pre-approving a loan,” Alan Swahn, VP of marketing at ISV and systems integrator AI Foundry, told us. “But, to actually issue that loan, they are still dealing with a lot of paper and armies of people keying in data. So, while the UI may have gone through a digital transformation, everything else is old school.”

Added, Ralf Göbel, COO of data capture software and crowdsourcing specialist ScaleHub, “The problem is that the back-end systems used to process this input are not fast enough. The apps and Web sites might be flexible and fast enough to provide a great experience on the front-end, but the back ends at many big companies have not kept up, and they are too slow.”

This is not a new problem. It was back in 2010 that AIIM, with the help of noted technology author and consultant Geoffrey Moore, first started talking about connecting Systems of Engagement (the front end) with Systems of Record (the back-end). Since then it seems the disconnect has only widened, as investments have tilted toward improving mobile apps and UIs, and, as usual, back-end improvements in areas like ECM,  have been often pushed (no pun intended) to the back burner.

Obviously, this would seem to create opportunity for savvy capture and ECM vendors and integrators who know how to package their software and services as part of a total Digital Transformation solution. That said, their systems need to be architected correctly to integrate with multi-channel front-end input avenues, as well as other back-end systems that are driving business decisions.

RPA is an interesting avenue for achieving some of this integration. As we also went over in last week's issue, when Kofax first purchased Kapow, it was presented as application integration software. This capability (as well as the ability to learn by example) seems to be one of the core tenets of products in the emerging RPA space. And indeed, while Kofax has yet to see much crossover between capture and RPA, there are RPA vendors like UiPath, which, through a partnership with ABBYY, have added document processing to their RPA portfolios. 

Kofax has seen a parallel between the capture and RPA markets in the desire by users to introduce workflow automation to data being gathered to RPA and data being captured from documents. This makes absolute sense within the landscape of the Digital Transformation, where the desire is to get things done faster and in a more automated way. So, if you look at it from a process management standpoint, UI, capture, and RPA all should be connected, along with automated workflows and back-end systems. That seems to be the Holy Grail of Digital Transformation.

I'll leave you with one more analogy. Let's go back to my first statement about the Digital Transformation being sexy. Unfortunately, more often than not, however, today it seems to be like the beautiful person you meet at the bar whose conversation might only go as deep as reality TV. Introducing capture, RPA, and workflow could be akin to sending this person to college (and even grad school), where they learn to discuss business, politics, philosophy and all sorts of other interesting topics. Of course, the question is, do you have the budget for that? It's my hunch that if you look at the ROIs for college, and you look at the ROIs for completing the Digital Transformation, they might be similar. At least I'm hoping their both positive, with two teenagers in school and a business heavily invested in the capture and ECM markets.