This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 issue of The Record. 

A productive, adaptable, scalable and secure digital workforce should be able to effectively collaborate with human colleagues; efficiently and cost-effectively execute ­mission-critical business applications; and identify opportunities for both cost savings and financial gains.

This workforce should ideally be part of an organisation’s DNA – it is the starting gate to enterprise digital transformation. But communications and media companies are realising that automation alone is not enough.

Rather, it takes a foundation of intelligent automation to enable such cognitive technologies as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and sentiment analysis. Beyond that, strong technology partnerships are the glue that binds these technologies together to give organisations the AI functions and insights they want.

For example, at Blue Prism, we’ve developed a robust technology ecosystem of technical alliances that complement our comprehensive robotic process automation (RPA) platform. We see AI as an augmentation of the digital worker – not a new breed of automation – that expands those abilities.

As part of our cloud-based AI initiative, we’ve partnered with Microsoft Cognitive Services to make it easier to integrate AI into our digital workforce platform. The AI aspects add yet another layer to our partnership with Microsoft, which also includes Blue Prism as the only RPA vendor to achieve both Microsoft Gold Certified partner status and offer a certified cloud reference architecture for Microsoft Azure.

Several global customers, including telecommunications conglomerate Telefonica O2 are now using our digital workforce in concert with native access to Microsoft’s Cognitive Services and AI platform – including such features as text analytics, text and speech translation, language understanding intelligent service, and computer vision.

Blue Prism’s integration architecture also allows customers and partners to reach out to any solution and technology, allowing for much more innovation and creativity on solution design.  For example, for text analytics and elastic search, we can automatically mine big data and archival records to extract historical data research and business intelligence (BI) analytics. And, for machine learning, we can enhance chatbot capabilities by predictive responses based on current and historical datasets.This is just the start of an exciting future.

Steven Armstrong is vice president and global lead for the Microsoft Alliance at Blue Prism

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