A Conversational Digital Assistant for Intelligent Process Automation
This addresses the problem of limited RPA adoption in regulated industries by making automation more accessible to business users, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing RPA and agent frameworks.
The paper tackles the lack of accessibility in robotic process automation (RPA) for business users by introducing a conversational digital assistant that enables interaction and customization through natural language, demonstrating its effectiveness on loan approval and travel preapproval processes.
Robotic process automation (RPA) has emerged as the leading approach to automate tasks in business processes. Moving away from back-end automation, RPA automated the mouse-click on user interfaces; this outside-in approach reduced the overhead of updating legacy software. However, its many shortcomings, namely its lack of accessibility to business users, have prevented its widespread adoption in highly regulated industries. In this work, we explore interactive automation in the form of a conversational digital assistant. It allows business users to interact with and customize their automation solutions through natural language. The framework, which creates such assistants, relies on a multi-agent orchestration model and conversational wrappers for autonomous agents including RPAs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on a loan approval business process and a travel preapproval business process.