Getting Started with Automation Anywhere's IQBot

Krista White: So thanks Brendan for sitting down with us today. So at Driven, there's been a lot of talk about intelligent automation in general. And your session today focused on IQ Bot, which is the offering from Automation Anywhere. Can you give us just an overview of what IQ Bot is?

Brendan S: Sure. So it complements what RPA does already, right? In a sense, RPA democratizes automation. It makes it available to people that are not technical. You have technologies that focus on very detailed mechanical stuff almost. RPA removes itself from that and you can record yourself doing a bunch of different things. It automates what is mundane to you or your team.

Brendan S: What RPA out of the box doesn't do too well is to extract data from sources that are kind of fuzzy, right? Images that are scanned, loose text in emails or contracts. What IQ Bot does is it makes it easy for people that don't have a technical background to extract the data from those sources and then feed it back into RPA so that RPA can automate the entire thing end to end.

Brendan S: So we do use AI in the product because it's a good way to achieve good results from the extraction of that type of data. And really the solution itself is geared towards non technical users. Because the last thing we want is for people to have to understand what natural language processing is, what a regression is or what a gradient descent is for them to be able to leverage the technology in a convincing and productive way, right? So that's what IQ Bot really does.

Krista White: So as a business user, how do I get started with IQ Bot? How do I find the right thing to process?

Brendan S: Right.

Krista White: How do I find the right thing-

Brendan S: Right, right.

Krista White: To put through, add intelligence to.

Brendan S: So any document that is preferably scanned because it's harder to extract, any document that feeds any given business process you can use as a candidate for IQ Bot, right?

Brendan S: Because really IQ Bot will feed into a process. So if the first step to a process you're looking at is to get someone to extract data from a scanned document, it's a good candidate for IQ Bot potentially, right? Because you could get it to very easily get trained on that document, extract the data, turn a scanned image into a spreadsheet essentially. And automate it really easily without having to write a single line of script. That's the idea.

Brendan S: So any business process that feeds off of scanned images is a good process for IQ Bot to look at.

Krista White: So are there any use cases that you see very commonly, widely adopted in different verticals or?

Brendan S: Yeah. It's any company really uses paper. It's kind of like the discussion about mainframe, right? Mainframe's going away, it's been going away for 25 years. It's still here. Paper's going away, but it's not going away fast. It's still here today.

Brendan S: So IQ Bot is applicable to really any vertical I'd say that there's still room for things we don't yet do with IQ Bot. Right? So if you think in terms of the type of images you can process, you have stuff like invoices, purchase orders, various types of forms where the layout is relatively known. The data that's in those documents is known as well. And those are good candidates for IQ Bot.

Brendan S: What we're looking at doing in the future is all of the unstructured stuff. So instead of focusing on just scanned images, we could focus on video feeds or in a more practical sense, the content of emails because the content of emails is there's no structure to it, right? When you send an email to get a status on something you purchased for instance, you don't have a format, you just write it down. Extracting data from that is pretty difficult. So the next step for us is to be able to also handle those use cases. Yeah.

Krista White: Nice, that's very exciting.

Brendan S: Yeah, it's fantastic. We're never out of ideas of things to implement in the product to a point where we effectively started about a year and a half ago selling this product actively. Since we started we grew to a team of probably about 150 people worldwide, and we have a team of 80 engineers only focused on that, only focused on IQ Bot because for us to give the ability to our customers to automate business processes, regardless of the type of data they actually have to ingest in them is crucial. That's what will make a difference between us and all of our competitors out there. Right? That's the way for us to stay ahead and not get commoditized. So that's why we're doing this.

Krista White: Lovely. Well, thanks for sitting down with us today.

Brendan S: Cool. Thank you.

Krista White: You can catch more about IQ Bot here on our channel when you subscribe.

Brendan S: Yeah.