Thanks to countless science fictions novels and movies, we have all grown up reading about or watching robots taking over civilisations. And they always seem to offer this super-simple emotionless reasoning to justify their hostile takeover of the human race (I am looking at you, Ultron!) Thankfully, that stuff is just for the movies! So, let’s set aside the movie robots and talk about RPA robots, the robotic processes that pick up our slack for us!
UiPath, one of the leaders in Robotic Process Automation tools, hosted their annual event – Forward III in the year 2019. One of the major takeaways from this event was A Robot For Every Person.
What is ‘A Robot For Every Person’?
UiPath’s CEO Daniel Dines has a big hairy audacious goal that he calls A Robot for Every Person. About 45 years ago, two crazy kids had a similar big audacious goal to put a computer on every desk in every home. It set in motion things that those two alone couldn’t have achieved (or, could they?).
But, this seemingly unachievable dream – even laughable to some – was made possible by humankind’s incredible potential to innovate. Today we have computers not only on our desks but in our pockets and on our wrists!
The idea behind this goal is for everyone to have a digital assistant, i.e. a robot that is trained to do the slack work that once its master used to do. This assistant performs the boring and mundane parts of one’s daily responsibilities, thereby freeing up time do better and more important things.
So Why Are You Telling Me This?
This digital assistant is a simpleton that has no mind of its own. It does exactly what it has been trained to do, no matter how small the task – or big. The small things, when needed to be done repeatedly in a day can really add up and eat a lot of your time.
Run a fingertip calculation on how many minutes do you spend moving emails around, or changing statuses on Salesforce cases or any Ticketing System utilised by your team. They might seems small numbers individually, but move 30 emails per day, work 50 cases in a day and you see how it can eat up your time.
The beauty of having a digital assistant is that you can get it do these really small things, which frees you up to, say, spend an extra minute with an irate customer on the phone and reassure them that you’ve got their back! Or, complete that training you’ve been pushing back because of all those emails and cases…
So, now I have to make my own bots too?
Look at it this way… When there’s a leaky shower head in the bathroom, not everyone would go and open the taps, fix it themselves and get on with the day. Some things must be left to the professionals!
But how about that squeaky hinge on the door that’s been bugging you forever? There’s always something that you can take care of on your own, something that takes lesser knowledge or expertise but can bring you value or at least the peace of mind. And the tools are more or less the same, aren’t they?
My goal is to help you learn to use these tools and fix the squeaky hinges of your daily job. To get updates about the training modules, please join our mailing list.
Talk to you in the next post!
