NelsonHall recently attended Automation Anywhere's 2020 innovation day, where the company launched its Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface (AARI) digital assistant focused on making bot usage easier and more accessible to employees.

Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface

AARI “aims to elevate employees' workflows in the same manner as at-home digital assistants such as Alexa and Siri have enhanced their home life” and increase the adoption of RPA in the front and back office.

The AARI application allows users to:

• Launch bots providing integrations to, for example, Salesforce, Google Sheets, and Microsoft Excel through a chat-based interface in addition to via the desktop application, mobile, and web interfaces. Automation Anywhere will also add voice support for accessing bots
• Provide form-style entry into the bot, with the information then disseminated to the client’s business applications
• Manage escalation scenarios.

Automation Anywhere expects CoEs to use AARI to create attended bots triggered using natural language conversations for workgroups or business users across front and back offices.

For example, in a contact center handling customer loans, once the CoE has established the logic behind loan terms and conditions, the workflow with AARI could be optimized to:

• Collect the customer data from across platforms before the call, and present it in the contact center’s CRM platform of choice (e.g., Salesforce)
• Provide forms during the call for the CX agent to populate with information from the conversation, which can then be used to populate the appropriate platforms, reducing the need for re-entry of information
• Extract unstructured information from emailed PDFs using IQ Bot and run credit checks in the background
• Suggest context-specific next-best actions incorporating business rules
• On a natural language command from the CX agent to AARI, such as ‘send over the new loan terms to this customer,’ use the previously established logic to create a set of terms and conditions and email them to the customer.

Early adopter client examples include:

• Colombian financial services firm Bancolombia using AARI to reduce in-branch wait times. The deployment of AARI was completed in one month and resulted in a $19m reduction in provision costs, 59% reduction in response time, and delivered a 1300% ROI in its first year
• CX BPO firm TaskUs using AARI to improve employee experience along with shorter training cycles and improved agent performance for a San Antonio-based client, resulting in a 20-second reduction in AHT, a 3.4% improvement in CSAT, and 2.7% improvement in call quality.

Interactions with AARI are created using standard drag-and-drop task items from the toolbox and can leverage Automation Anywhere's Discovery Bot and other features. AARI will be charged on a $35 per user per month basis.

How distinctive is the AARI concept?

• UiPath’s Forms feature provides an input form functionality similar to AARI to allow users to design forms for a user to input data, then disseminate the input data across its business applications, but does not allow users to launch bots through a conversational input with a digital assistant
• The NICE Employee Virtual Assistant (NEVA) acts as an automation finder to launch pre-existing processes and conversational AI-based scenarios but lacks form-style entry
• In the front office space, the use of bots to integrate platforms to reduce data entry and swivel chair activities is not new. Many of the CX Services vendors have had this form of capability for some years, in addition to handling escalation scenarios as a hygiene factor. These platforms do not, however, offer the automation capabilities of an RPA implementation. The CX vendors also have roadmaps to include features such as chatbots to capture sensitive information and assess the customer's tone to provide answers tailored to their emotional response.

Automation Anywhere differs in bringing together the form data entry capabilities of the RPA providers and CX vendors, and the more niche ability to interact with bots through more conversational means.