When to Use Cognitive Automation with Sameer Bhandari of Automation Anywhere

Krista White: Thanks Sameer for joining us today. So you just got off your keynote where you talked about how cognitive capabilities bring extra power to robotic process automation. Can you give me kind of an overview of that?

Sameer: Sure. I think for very long, customers and people who've wanted to kind of get initiated with RPA have felt like cognitive is this way too advanced out there kind of technology, which they are at least two to three years from trying. The funny thing is for cognitive automation, if your business process has a document, it's really as simple as that. That's where you can use it. So for example, let's say, you look at invoices or loan applications, if those are part of the process that you touch, right? Cognitive automation is, the one for you. Simply because it means you're merely using it to intelligently extract only the information you want out of that document. And then, go about your day processing it any way you deem fit. In finality on that point, I'll say that cognitive automation works best in conjunction with RPA. So it's not this whole standalone piece of technology. You can blend it with anything else that you have. You can bend it with chat bots, you can bend it with, with RPA. So yeah, the sky's the limit.

Krista White: So one thing that we get asked a lot, I'm sure you guys do too, is how do I get started using cognitive in my robotic process automation or in my automation journey in general. So where do, where do you suggest starting and how do you suggest people ... What's your best practice for it?

Sameer: So good question, right? I mean that, that's exactly why we developed the IQ bot, because we as an RPA software company got asked that a lot. Saying, look we're going to start, we're thinking of starting, we're hearing all these things about cognitive, where do I really get started? And my mantra is really three simple things. One is, look at your process and see if there's a decision to be made in that process. Two, look at that process and see if there's a document that's part of that process. And three, look at that process and see if you're going to repeat that process on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. If your answer to two of those three years, yes, you can pretty much get started with cognitive automation.

Sameer: As a matter of fact, the reason we built the IQ bot and the reason why we're seeing so much success in implementing it with partners like yourselves, is the fact that there's so much documentation out there and when people tend to think of which process of mind is really manual, you know, big clue, look for a process that has a document in it and I think you'll find your answer there.

Krista White: So decisions, documents, repeatability.

Sameer: Absolutely.

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

Krista White: Not at all. You can catch Sameer's keynote on this channel or more from Driven on this channel as well. Subscribe.