What are the benefits of cognitive automation?

A company’s cognitive automation strategy will not be built in a vacuum. While technologies have shown strong gains in terms of productivity and efficiency, “CIO was to look way beyond this,” said Tom Taulli author of The Robotic Process Automation Handbook. Cognitive automation will enable them to get more time savings and cost efficiencies from automation.

While there are clear benefits of cognitive automation, it is not easy to do right, Taulli said. CIOs need to create teams that have expertise with data, analytics and modeling. Because of this, it is a good idea to start with clear-cut use cases. And it’s usually better to focus on back-office applications. Then, as the organization gets more comfortable with this type of technology, it can extend to customer-facing scenarios.

It’s also important to plan for the new types of failure modes of cognitive analytics applications.

“The governance of cognitive automation systems is different, and CIOs need to consequently pay closer attention to how workflows are adapted,” said Jean-François Gagné, co-founder and CEO of Element AI.

These systems require proper setup of the right data sets, training and consistent monitoring of the performance over time to adjust as needed. Cognitive systems may be more resilient than RPA in many ways.

“But this doesn’t mean they don’t need proper care and adjustments over time,” Gagne said.