What is intelligent automation? A definition

What is intelligent automation (IA), and how does it differ from robotic process automation (RPA)? While IA and RPA are sometimes used interchangeably, these are two distinct practice areas.

RPA is a technology that automates simple, digital tasks like completing forms, organizing documents, or performing simple searches and queries.

Intelligent automation is the process of integrating AI with systems in order to automate more complex tasks, generate insights, and learn from experience.

This creates some fundamental differences between IA and RPA and what they can do.

Simple vs complex

RPA can only complete simple tasks, like organizing, moving, and storing data or files. Most of these tasks are manual, time-consuming, and highly repetitive—and worth automating—but do not require cognition, interpretation, or analysis of content.

IA can complete complex work that requires higher-order thinking. For example, it can “read” the text within a file and categorize it based on intent, or analyze website usage data to find patterns and suggest improvements that would increase conversion rates.

Programmed vs self-learning

RPA can only work within a set of rules. Either an RPA system is programmed to complete a few specific steps, or a user records a task and the RPA solution copies their behavior. Either way, RPA can only repeat what it’s told or shown to do.

IA can teach itself how to complete tasks, and can improve its performance the more it repeats a task. While RPA will always repeat a task the same way every time, IA can identify more efficient steps to reach the same outcome at higher accuracy rates.

Siloed vs integrated

RPA technology largely works in isolation. An RPA system is typically self-contained and has everything it needs to complete its tasks. Each bot is programmed to complete one simple task that does not connect directly with anything other bots are doing.

IA is an integrated solution. Different elements of the solution can learn from each other, and the solution can combine a wide range of cognitive capabilities like computer vision, business process management, and character recognition from external tools.

In sum: Intelligent automation (IA) vs. robotic process automation (RPA) is a false debate. Intelligent automation is a modern process that layers over robotic process automation and lets you automate more complex workflows, and robotic process automation is a component of intelligent automation. Overall, intelligent automation and robotic process automation are two components of a single system for automating modern, complex, digital workflows.

Intelligent automation upgrades robotic process automation–giving you even greater speed, cost savings, and performance boosts across more processes.

AIOps leverages AI to better manage IT infrastructure. It uses data pulled from a mature observability practice to rapidly detect operational and security problems, to investigate them thoroughly, and to better understand what happened and how to remediate it. In turn, this helps teams solve IT problems faster, easier, and more completely.

AIOps also gives security and operations teams the visibility, control, and insights they need to proactively find and fix vulnerabilities within their IT estate, and to overall improve and maintain the performance of their technology infrastructure.

Intelligent automation is a core component of AIOps. It automates many of the complex tasks and analyses involved in AIOps, and provides a fast, accurate, and scalable way to resolve any issues that AIOps brings to light.

In sum: Intelligent automation is powerful on its own, but it becomes even more effective when combined with AIOps and a mature observability practice. Together, they let you automate many of the most important elements of keeping your IT infrastructure up and performant.

Combining AIOps with Intelligent Automation

BMC offers a simple, powerful, unified solution that makes it easy to integrate intelligent process automation with AIOps and observability—all within one platform, out of the box.

BMC Helix for Observability and AIOps is a full stack solution and is a recognized leader in its category that provides every essential capability to establish both observability and AIOps within your IT stack. These core capabilities include: