Google Next ’19 Review: Building Smarter Software Robots

This week we attended Google Next in San Francisco and one of the standout themes was how much AI & ML are being utilised to solve real-world problems. One of the sessions that we’d like to draw your attention to was “MLAI231 – Building Smarter Software Robots with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Google Cloud AI“. Here we saw how RPA was being used to “Read” thousands of scanned paper invoices and process them, the cute part of the presentation was how with the help of AI the RPA “Robot” was able to understand different types of invoice formats. As the AI was able to learn where to find an invoice number, list items and price, over time, the RPA process was becoming more and more accurate and relied less on human interaction.

RPA revenue has grown 63% in 2018, and we expect to see more and more use cases of RPA & AI within many organisations, not just the large enterprises. As we look to the future of this technology we will very quickly find more tasks that will benefit from the joining of RPA and AI, and we can’t wait to start implementing those solutions.