Glossary of Automation + AI terms

API

API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface, which is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other.

Attended Automations

Attended automations are designed to assist an individual worker with a task that is part of a larger process with the end goal of helping them work faster and with more accuracy for an overall increase in productivity. Attended automations involve a human-in-the-loop, where the individual worker either provides an input, reviews data for accuracy and validation, or receives an output of data that is crucial for completing a process offline, such as handling a customer service inquiry.

Automation 360

Automation 360 is a single, integrated platform that transcends front office and back office technology siloes to automate business processes across all systems and applications, including both SaaS and legacy apps.

Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface (AARI)

Improve employee productivity with a cloud-delivered digital assistant for everyone. Think of AARI as every employee's digital assistant. Scale automation workforce-wide with easy-access automation across platforms, applications, and devices, and simplify work by consolidating data and multi-app complexity into a single-pane-of-glass employee view.

Automation Leaders

Automation leaders are individuals who are charged with overseeing the development, management, and scale of a company’s automation program - sometimes referred to as an automation Center of Excellence (CoE). They may sit inside of an IT organization or in a line of business, and may lead one of multiple automation programs across an enterprise. They may be charged with implementing automation programs that drive business objectives which may include the creating process efficiencies, reducing costs or improving the employe experience - all of which lead to broader enterprise transformation goals.

Automation Software

Automation software is computer programs or tools that perform repetitive tasks without much human involvement. It saves time, reduces errors, and increases efficiency by automating manual processes in various industries and applications.

Back Office

The back office is the portion of a company made up of administration and support personnel who are not client-facing. Back-office functions include settlements, clearances, record maintenance, regulatory compliance, accounting, and IT services.

Banking Automation

Banking automation is the use of technology and software to streamline and improve banking processes, from customer transactions to financial reporting, reducing manual work and enhancing efficiency.

Bots (Software Bots)

Software bots, short for "robot", are simple or complex computer programs designed to do specific actions, such as automating repetitive tasks or simulating human users, among others. Bots are task-centric.

BPaaS

BpaaS stands for "Business Process as a Service," and it refers to cloud-based services that provide businesses with pre-built or customizable solutions for automating and managing various business processes.

BPM

BPM stands for "Business Process Management," which is a discipline and set of tools used to analyze, optimize, and automate business processes for improved efficiency and effectiveness.

Business Leaders

Business Leaders seek to adopt intelligent automation to drive specific business objectives, such as creating process efficiencies, eliminating costly human error, reducing costs, or improving the employe experience by offloading tasks - all of which lead to broader enterprise transformation goals. Business leaders will partner with automation leaders to develop automation initiatives that will help meet these goals and lead change management initiatives to drive adoption among teams.

Center of Excellence (or Automation Centers of Excellence)

Generally speaking, a Center of Excellence (CoE) can be described as a competency or capability center run by a group of experts in the CoE’s focus area. The CoE is usually built around critical processes, technologies, or applications to help the company adopt a particular process and eventually become more efficient. A CoE is not so much a physical center, though. It’s a team, shared facility, or think tank that provides best practices, leadership, research, training, and/or support for a subject area.

An Automation Center of Excellence is a core team or program charged with overseeing the development, management, and scale of a company’s automation program. The automation CoE They may sit inside of an IT organization or in a line of business, and may be one of multiple automation programs across an enterprise. They may be charged with implementing automation programs that drive business objectives which may include the creating process efficiencies, reducing costs or improving the employe experience - all of which lead to broader enterprise transformation goals.

Centralized CoE Approach

Many automation CoEs are centralized, meaning they operate as the singular governing automation CoE within an organization, supporting automation initiatives across every team or line of business. Benefits of a centralized approach include tighter governance and security controls and a consistent methodology and processes that can be replicated across automation initiatives. Centralized CoEs can run into barriers to scale as demands from business units can outweigh the resources that a centralized CoE may be able to provide.

Chatbot (or Collaborative Chatbots)

A chatbot is a software application used to conduct an online chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human. Chatbots use conversational AI, which combines RPA with NLP and ML, to intelligently handle routine customer, prospect, employee, and other inquiries so human workers can focus on more challenging interactions and higher-value work. Intelligent chatbots always have the opportunity to request human intervention when necessary.

Citizen Developer

A citizen developer is a business user who deeply understands the business processes and contributes to building automations - enabling organizations to innovate faster than their competitors by leveraging the business expertise of their business users and the development expertise of their IT teams.

Cloud-Native

The term cloud native refers to the concept of building and running applications to take advantage of the distributed computing offered by the cloud delivery model. Cloud-native apps are designed and built to exploit the scale, elasticity, resiliency, and flexibility the cloud provides.

Cloud automation

Cloud automation refers to business process automation using cloud-native, web-based, Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence (RPA+AI) software.

Digital Co-Worker

Digital Workers are virtual employees that enhance and augment human work by combining AI, machine learning, RPA, and analytics to automate business functions from end to end.

Digital Workforce

A Digital Workforce is the combination of RPA, AI and Analytics, or RPA, IQ Bot, and Bot Insight.

Document Automation

Document Automation is a new Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solution build natively on Automation 360. Its native integration with Automation 360 allows businesses to harness the power of IDP, RPA and AI on a single cloud platform - making it faster than ever to extract and embed document data into any business process –a uniquely complete document processing and automation solution. And all of this is done in a single, seamless user experience to get users up and running fast.

Federated CoE Approach

Many automation CoEs are federated, meaning they operate as a distributed network of automation teams and programs across various lines of business with as the singular governing body that sets standard operating procedures and generally sits within central IT. Benefits of a federated approach include the ability to scale quickly, proximity to the business (and therefore a deeper understanding of business goals), and the ability to pivot quickly as the business shifts. Limitations include difficulties with maintaining governance and security controls and high potential for redundant initiatives that can cause inefficiencies across the organization.

Front Office

The front office represents the customer-facing division of a firm. For example, customer service, sales, and industry experts who provide advisory services are considered part of a firm's front office operations. The functions of the front office generally generate the majority of revenue for a firm.

Intelligent Document Processing

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), sometimes referred to as intelligent capture, is a set of technologies that can be used to understand and turn unstructured and semi-structured data into a structured format.

Intelligent Automation

Intelligent Automation (IA) (also referred to as Hyperautomation) is the combination of various automation technologies like RPA, artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML), intelligent documeny processing (IDP) and process discovery to assist human workers and automate processes that deliver a high ROI and ultimately business transformation. RPA is the core technology and root of the broader Intelligent Automation category that has since expanded to include adjacent technologies, as well as human-in-the-loop processes that empower business users.

Microservices

Microservices are an architectural and organizational approach to software development where software is composed of small independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs. These services are owned by small, self-contained teams. Microservices architectures make applications easier to scale and faster to develop, enabling innovation and accelerating time-to-market for new features.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process that converts an image of text into a machine-readable text format. Unlike optical character recognition (OCR), IDP uses artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to capture, classify, and extract the most difficult-to-automate data.

Process Discovery

Process discovery is an assortment of technologies and techniques to identify how people perform business processes. A step beyond conventional process mining, the goal of process discovery is to improve business process efficiency. It uses machine learning and Artificial Intelligence to show organizations what steps they can take to automate existing processes to achieve this objective. It also illustrates new processes they can automate to streamline critical work functions like human resources or customer service. Process discovery uses more modern technology that, instead of relying on system-generated logs, uses computer vision to observe and capture tasks and processes. It tracks workflow at the user interface, no matter who performs the task or which application is used. It excels at capturing discrete sub-processes but has trouble scaling because it ultimately requires human evaluation of the results.

Process Intelligence

Process intelligence advances process discovery by using computer vision and AI to uncover actionable process insights at an enterprise scale. It has the speed and coverage to capture, record, and analyze granular steps in complex use cases. In addition, it adds intelligence to quickly identify new opportunities. Process intelligence is the automatic, continuous acquisition of business process data across every enterprise system for fast and accurate visibility into the current state of your processes.

Process Mining

Process mining takes an app-based approach to generate a high-level view of a process to examine bottlenecks. Mining tools rely mainly on software log files from a single solution to capture the data to which algorithms can be applied in an attempt to define processes. This method has limited coverage and misses tasks such as data collection, calculations, or other steps performed in separate applications.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

With RPA you can create digital co-workers to take on the mundane, repetitive tasks. RPA enables you to create software robots (“bots”) that are programmed to record and subsequently mimic human digital actions. Bots observe typed text, commands, menus clicked, and other actions performed via a keyboard and mouse/trackpad, and then the bots replicate those actions to complete tasks on a repetitive basis.

Task Mining

Task mining automatically captures and analyzes user interactions with systems and provides a detailed view of how users perform specific tasks, including the steps they take, the time spent on each step, and the applications or systems involved. It can help identify inefficiencies and can be used to support automation initiatives, by identifying manual tasks that can be automated to save time and reduce errors.