Compared to the past decade, the speed at which technology advances is relatively fast today. If the move from large-scale enterprise-based mainframe applications to flexible cloud-based applications took decades to stabilize, it hardly takes months to develop to bring on-board new technologies to improve the technological capabilities of business applications.

Cognitive Automation is the next in line for evolution if we look at the patterns taking shape in industries using RPA to increase their productivity and speed of operation.

RPA and cognitive automation all make companies more efficient and smarter. Perhaps they represent the two ends of the smart spectrum of automation. RPA refers to the software at the simple end of the spectrum which is programmed to perform specific tasks through applications, to help eradicate routine, repetitive tasks performed by humans.

Cognitive automation at the other end of the spectrum imitates human thinking and behavior to handle and interpret vast quantities with much greater speed, precision, and consistency than even humans. By using various algorithms and technical solutions, it brings insight to information-intensive processes.

Cognitive Document Automation uses a range of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning to cluster, identify, isolate, OCR, extract and understand (human language) any form of text. Machine Learning is a key component of CDA, easing CDA system setup and maintenance.

Cognitive automation has a range of benefits when opposed to other forms of artificial intelligence. We educate cognitive automation systems until they can make an impact to automate complex business processes that require less data. They don’t need support from data scientists to create complicated models which business users can use in just a few weeks.

When more data is applied to the cognitive network, more correlations allow it to keep learning unsupervised and to update the new data it is being fed.

Written by: Jimmi Chandra