A Guide to Your Digital Workforce

An intelligent automation (IA) digital workforce is the future of work, utilizing digital technology to enhance the capabilities of employees and businesses alike.

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), business process management (BPM), natural language processing (NLP), and robotic process automation (RPA), all of which are elements in the IA sphere, organizations can now automate tedious manual tasks to improve efficiency, reduce costs and free up human employees to focus on more strategic initiatives.

This digital workforce can operate 24/7, making it a powerful force in scaling critical business operations and unlocking new growth opportunities. This page explores the benefits, automation implementation strategies, and best practices for adopting an IA digital workforce in your organization.

Key takeaways you’ll learn about the digital workforce:

• What a digital workforce does
• Where RPA fits within your digital workforce
• How a digital workforce can be utilized to drive business value
• Features and benefits of a digital workforce

The intelligent automation digital workforce refers to the use of AI, ML, NLP, and RPA to automate repetitive and mundane tasks traditionally performed by human workforces.

Digital workers can work independently (unattended mode ) or with a human-in-the-loop (HITL) (attended mode) to complete individual tasks to transform complex business processes.

What does a digital workforce do?

The SS&C Blue Prism digital workforce is a technology-powered workforce that can learn and adapt to new tasks and processes, improving accuracy and efficiency, and working around the clock without interruption. It’s designed to enhance human workers’ productivity, improve customer experiences and drive business growth.

The IA digital workforce is increasingly being adopted by organizations across industries to transform their operations and stay competitive in the digital age.

With business process management (BPM) is a digital workforce platform where you can analyze, manage and optimize your IA program to ensure it’s continuously running at peak performance.

What is the difference between a digital workforce and an RPA bot?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the process of automating business tasks.

RPA robots or ‘bots’ are software robots that automate repetitive and rule-based tasks effectively, while an intelligent automation digital workforce combines RPA with cognitive automation technologies like machine learning, natural language understanding, and AI to enable more complex automation of tasks requiring decision-making, judgment and analysis capabilities.

RPA bots are suitable for automating simple processes while an IA digital workforce is required for more complex processes. An IA digital workforce provides faster and more efficient processing of information and reduces the risk of errors, thereby increasing productivity and innovation.

Do I need RPA for a digital workforce?

RPA is one of many tools in the intelligent automation digital workforce. In fact, it’s an essential component of a digital workforce because helps streamline and automate repetitive, rule-based tasks.

RPA helps free up time for employees to focus on more creative and complex tasks, performing tasks quickly and accurately with the ability to integrate with various systems to input and output data. While other technologies such as AI and ML are also part of a digital workforce, RPA is the necessary first step in your automation process.

At their core, digital workers are designed to mimic human actions, taking over the work that your business users really shouldn’t have to do.

Digital workforces can be applied in various industries such as customer service, finance, and accounting, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail. Natural language understanding chatbots and virtual assistants can handle customer inquiries and support your human agents, while AI algorithms can help with financial analysis and forecasting.

In healthcare, digital workers can assist with patient data management and monitoring. In supply chain and manufacturing, they can help improve production processes. In retail, digital workers can assist with inventory management, pricing optimization, and personalized marketing.

Overall, a digital workforce can enhance efficiency, productivity, and cost-effectiveness in various industries. Let’s look specifically at what sort of work digital workers can perform.

Where can a digital workforce help?

Digital workers can automate various business processes. With their ability for learning and deep understanding as they automate, they’re able to expand their scope and scale across your enterprise.

• High-volume and repetitive tasks: Digital workers are designed to handle work with high volume and repetition to increase efficiency and reduce the risk of human errors – ultimately saving your organization time and money.
• Use of multiple applications: Digital workers mimic human workers, but they also connect systems. Even if you have a process spanning multiple applications or interacting with other departments, IA allows your digital workers to interact with the process end-to-end. Even if it’s not possible to automate the end-to-end process, these intelligent software robots can at least expedite that work and alleviate the more boring aspects of it from your actual workers.
• Existing legacy systems: Digital workers are especially adept at working across legacy IT systems and processes that are otherwise difficult to integrate. This helps improve your business automation readiness for future scaling.
• Cyclical work: Some business functions happen occasionally, such as seasonal or annual inventory checks. Traditionally, an employee would be pulled from their usual work to handle these time-consuming tasks, but digital workers can be brought in to work alongside humans to assist, or even replace, that labor.
• Defined workflow: Reproducible, documented workflows are an ideal opportunity for automation software. Systematic procedures are typically the first to be automated and since digital workers function like human workers, they can easily speed up your throughput in these defined workflows.
• Use of structured data: For tasks where data is clearly defined, such as standardized forms, digital workers can easily access, classify and utilize this data within the workflow. With third-party cognitive technology such as Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and Document Automation (DA), digital workers can also be trained to handle non-standardized work.

Key features of a digital workforce

With access to AI-powered technologies, digital workers can execute repetitive and time-consuming tasks with high accuracy and speed, also processing large amounts of data to provide insights and support decision-making.

Along with that, they improve process performance, continuously learning and optimizing as they run. Ultimately, digital workers are incredibly powerful digital tools for organizations wanting to grow their return on investment (ROI) and boost their operational efficiency.

A digital workforce has six notable characteristics:

1. Robust: Available 24/7, all year round
2. Fast: Perform tasks 5x faster than people
3. Accurate: Perform tasks with fewer errors and fewer reworks
4. Smart: Capable of learning and handling complex situations
5. Scalable: Deployed when and where you need them
6. Adaptable: Support lots of different scenarios and use cases

Benefits of a digital workforce

The SS&C Blue Prism intelligent digital workforce is designed to work with as little intervention as possible to achieve operational efficiency. Digital workers are the future of self-managed, enterprise-wide orchestration. These are just some of the benefits to workers and your business when implementing a digital workforce solution:

• Cost and efficiency savings: A digital workforce helps organizations do work in a fraction of the time, freeing your staff to focus on more exceptional or customer-facing tasks. They also reduce errors, rework, and delays.
• Freeing up resources: Too many resources are devoted to transactional work, but digital workers can be deployed to handle these tasks, alleviating organizations’ issues with staff shortages and skills gaps.
• Improving employee satisfaction: AI-enabled digital workers empower your people for more interesting work to avoid burnout and give them the opportunity to upskill their technical knowledge. This results in a more positive workforce experience.
• Better customer services: Employees receive more accurate and timely responses from an organization utilizing digital workers. Better quality customer experience means your employees are spending less time on customer complaints, and more time on ensuring your customers are happy.
• Strategic business outcomes: With digital workers easing the burden from the tedious front- and back-office tasks, your line of business teams can focus on strategic thinking to reach your ideal business impact, driving further value into your organization. Plus, with your team focused on this higher-value, interesting work, you’ll see a boost in employee morale.

Your intelligent SS&C Blue Prism digital workforce will reduce your time to market and quickly deliver organization-wide efficiencies. It frees and enables your employees to spend more time on higher-value work, such as delivering excellent customer service, all while facilitating exponential business growth and profitability. And it does this while ensuring the highest levels of security, compliance, and governance.

With the right setup and monitoring, your digital workers can enact total digital transformation for your entire organization’s system processes. Digital workers are extremely valuable members of your organization’s team and, when utilized correctly, can issue incredible ROI while learning and growing through your automation journey.