We all have witnessed the impact of automation and how it has improved human life. Thus far, most forms of automation have been delivered by physical robots.
In the retail sector, mega-chains Target and Walmart are already using robots to help check on inventory in stores. These robots roll down isles and can alert human workers if a certain product is out of stock or if an item has the wrong price tag. This is a great example of how a robot and human can work together and enhance the customer experience.
The software company AutomationAnywhere has released its own line of robots that it refers to as "digital workers." (Full disclosure: AutomationAnywhere is a Predikly partner.) While not physical robots, this collection of digital workers includes a digital accounts payable clerk, digital talent sourcer and digital talent acquisition coordinator that can be downloaded from the company's bot store. These digital workers are capable of automating mundane and repetitive tasks such as reading incoming email or generating invoices so that their human counterparts have more time to focus on tasks that require more in-depth decision making.
Thanks to robotic process automation and the companies advancing this technology like AutomationAnywhere, UiPath and BluePrism, there is a huge opportunity for these types of robots to become more mainstream and effect change in the workplace.
So, What Defines A Digital Worker?
Traditionally, a human is hired to do a job or complete a project. Every job role has a certain task to be performed. To perform a task, human workers need to have a set of skills or experience. Following this same line of thinking, a digital worker has a role as well. The difficult part is to make sure this robot is more human-centric than process-centric. Similar to a human worker, a digital worker needs to have a rich set of skills that need to be executed in order to complete a certain task. These tasks could be traditional automation tasks, cognitive tasks or a combination of both. A digital worker should also be designed to automate at least a fair percentage of the skills that correspond to its human professional counterpart.
Key Steps For Success
So now that we've looked at some examples of digital workers and explained what they are, it's important to cover how a business might go about implementing them. Below are some key steps to consider in order to have success with digital workers:
• The first thing you want to do is identify a role that needs to be automated by a digital worker. If you can't even identify such a role, then you will need to rethink the viability of having a digital worker.
• Assuming you have a role that could be filled by a digital worker, build out a detailed standard operating processing (SOP) diagram that will list out every step of the process. The SOP should include manual and automated steps.
• For every process, make sure it aligns with your business priorities and perform a return on investment analysis.
• While looking at the automation option, be sure to look at optimizing the process as well.
• Once the set of processes have been selected, make sure to get buy-in from senior management.
• For the trial run, limit the initial scope of deployment.
• Once the initial scope of deployment has achieved your desired success, develop a plan to scale the project.
Conclusion
By no means will digital workers replace human workers, but there is an opportunity for them to complement the human workforce. These digital workers can help optimize one of the most crucial commodities in the corporate world: the bandwidth of employees. By eliminating mundane, repetitive tasks, they can enable workers to take on projects that require more critical thinking and possibly even help boost productivity. The idea of the digital worker is still in its infancy, but its future is promising.
