By Jim Sinur
(Aragon Research) – Organizations have a number of sources for productivity, but bots look to be one of the most promising. While customer service-friendly bots are often the first off the launchpad, the bots of the future will be both software and hardware aimed at assisting humans in all types of situations. This blog outlines three major types of bots that you can expect to see today and in the near future.
1. Chatbots
These pleasant bots are most successful when it comes to simple, directed tasks, such as looking up and responding to a request. Since these are first generation chatbots, complex questions with multiple facets can confuse them, but over time, they will get better. Imagine if these bots could help customers bypass the frustrating voice response systems of today, in order to get service faster; I believe these kind of bots will make or break the bot movement.
2. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Bots
RPA Bots are usually under the covers doing dirty work for organizations or customers. Typically the kind of work that RPA does today is traversing different systems and data sources to come up with a integrated set of views and data necessary to support customer and business outcomes. As RPA matures, it will broaden in scope and increase productivity. It will likely start with the integration of user interface, systems, and structured data. Over time, RPA will reach to unstructured data and add analytics, machine learning, and deep learning. It will grow to become the knowledge worker’s best friend in particular specialties.
3. Digital Assistants
Like RPA Bots, Digital Assistants will evolve and become smarter to the level of calling on other bots to resolve an inquiry, a specific goal, or a complex set of outcomes. At first, these assistants will bond to individuals or individual specialty work pools, but over time, they will be able to generalize their skill capabilities. In the future, while there will still be a need for deep specialty Digital Assistants, the emergence of general purpose ‘genius’ bots will happen, too.
Bottom Line
Bots are here to assist us and will be prospering in the foreseeable future. The challenge will be to find the sweet spot for these bots and the logical combination of many of their different capabilities. I believe bots will free organizations from drudgery, to improve their processes and journeys, from the customer journey to the knowledge worker journey. That said, finding the perfect balance between humans and Chatbots, Digital Assistants, and RPA Bots will change over time and will be one of the biggest challenges for enterprises over the next decade.