The Evolution Of RPA To IPA – Adding ‘IQ' To The Bots

Gopi has over 23 years of experience in business & technology leadership which includes managing P&L, technology thought leadership, Delivery and people management. He has rich experience in the field of Analytics and Information Management, Portal and content management, Enterprise Security Services and Enterprise Mobility.

- Gopalakrishna Bylahalli

Automation is a buzz word amongst all industries, presently. The true visionaries in most of the industrial sectors have started adopting automation which empowers businesses to work smarter and improve process outcomes radically. If we look back into the course of history, we can see that Automation has existed from the last few decades itself. The Industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th century, introduced mechanical automation in manufacturing and the journey of automation still continues in varied forms and processes.

While RPA or Robotic Process Automation is misconstrued to apply to physical robots only, RPA has its virtual avatar in the form of the use of software to perform processes and functions with a set of pre-defined rules and logic to structured data.

In the last few years, the RPA industry has been advancing extensively and a new niche of RPA has emerged, known popularly as the Intelligent Process Automation or IPA. With availability and easy application of New Gen technologies, intelligent and self-learning techniques such as, machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) and machine vision, RPA has become Cognitive and developed a human like IQ. These cognitive capabilities have made the RPA more powerful and transformational to meet the next generation digital disruption requirements.

Introducing the ‘Intelligent’ Angle to RPA