Have you met Sofia? She is the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship. Amazing, right?

We are living in an exciting age, where technology that science fiction films have been showing us for years is finally coming to fruition. The concept of AI is no longer an abstract idea, but the way we will use it in business will change the way professionals run their operations - for the better.

AI

Artificial intelligence is predicted to be a $100 billion market by 2025. Teradata just conducted a survey where they found 80% of enterprises are already investing significantly in AI technologies.

Clearly, AI is a hot topic amongst the tech and enterprise world. However, there are no studies on how small to medium sized businesses plan on leveraging this technology. So far, this technology is sitting with enterprise-level businesses, but the shift into the B2B SMB market has already begun - and we are happy to be at the forefront of that shift.

Automation

Powered by the Cloud, automation has already revolutionized industries like Marketing and Sales. But there’s more to keeping businesses successful than having a great top of the funnel plan.

Automation will be a key technology that will help take the client journey from Marketing, all the way to Invoicing, in one system.

So, what types of technology go into automation? There are two technologies that every business can benefit from: Robotic Process Automation and Cognitive Automation.

Robotic Process Automation

The definition of robotic process automation (RPA) is the application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure computer software or a “robot” to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems.

One of the pain points we see every day is around data entry, in particular, time tracking. With RPA, business owners and project stakeholders will have 100 percent data accuracy and dramatically slash processing/admin time. This makes it easy for businesses to operate with fewer people since there is almost no time taken away from actual client work.

Cognitive Automation

The other type of automation is Cognitive automation. Which adds judgment to the automation equation. Though the bulk of this technology is used to help decipher (for example) if the image is of a cat or a dog, it does have a place in intelligent business process and helping data get ready for higher technologies like AI.

If you want to think of these technologies in terms of milestones, there are four steps to get to Artificial Intelligence:

1. First, you have the Cloud that gave rise to SaaS and cloud computing.
2. Second is RPA and Cogitative Automation which streamlines data entry and offers a tremendous help in getting answers from unstructured data sets.
3. The third is Machine Learning that needs a fair bit of accurate data (which is difficult when dealing with humans).  With this data, Machine Learning employs algorithms for pattern matching.
4. Finally, you get to Artificial Intelligence which helps understand all the unstructured data floating around in your system and make sense of it. For instance, customer interactions would be easily analyzed, processed, and structured into data used for the next steps of the process.

If you want to be technical, Machine Learning falls under the AI umbrella; however, it doesn’t have the ability to work outside of its programming parameters.

In the coming years, technology will massively change the way businesses run and this is just the start. Click here to experiment with smart automation technology today.