“That new guy is good. What’s his name?” …
“Errr…. Steve Austin, or something like that”
” Guy’s a machine. He does the work of 8 people! “
In the past 6 months, we’ve seen a substantial uptick in our client base – Financial Services firms are increasingly looking to use the newly found “powers of the cloud” to answer several interrelated questions:
How do I collate my organisation’s many data repositories into a usable form (aka building an “enterprise data lake”)?
How do I capture and make the unstructured data we’re creating meaningfully searchable and actionable?
How do I begin to deploy some Robotic Process Automation to improve our human efficiency?
The availability of cheap, fast, effectively limitless PAYG S3 style object storage presents the obvious place to begin to collate structured (Databases) and especially unstructured (PDF/Doc/Email, IM, Text, Voice etc.) data.
Some very cool new functionality from the Public Cloud vendors themselves has enabled translation of virtually all forms of human communication into searchable data, and clever contextual add-ons are turning that into computer accessible “information”.
You can even leave the data where it is and “glue” the bits together to create a “virtual data lake”.
And once you have these elements, the next obvious step is to begin to explore Robotic Process Automation to enhance the current systems, workflows and performance of the humans in the business.
We’re on the cusp of deploying the first iteration of “The Six Million Dollar Man” into our offices.
So what sort of work will we have this stage 1 Steve Austin do for us?
Well the use-cases are endless, but here are two that I am aware of:
- A large insurance firm performs QA on the calls in its Claims Call Centre using humans, listening to recordings of agent’s calls. The humans available can monitor 3% of call volumes. They are looking for examples of process failures and associated, regulatory or risk exposures, such as “My car hit a pedestrian.” Call agent should then say “Did you call the Police?”.
- An investment firm wants to perform as much of the “grunt work” research / market analysis for its highly paid Portfolio Managers as it can before they get to their desks in the morning – making them productive and active from 9:00 sharp.
Our Steve can do these tasks with his bionic eye closed.
With advanced and increasingly accurate real-time Speech to Text, Language Translation and Contextual Indexing triggering Robotic Process actions he can monitor 100% of calls in real time, and Steve can even tell the call centre agent: “You had best call them back and tell them to call the police, like NOW man.”
Whether you’re a fan, a foe or just fearful of all this new fangled RPA, BI, AI stuff, Skynet is gradually working towards becoming self-aware, and I am afraid that Steve Austin V1.0 is just too attractive an employee for equal-opportunity big business not to offer him a job 😉
If you’re interested in seeing some of these cool new technologies and talking with the people who are implementing them now, why not register for our upcoming “IntheClouds@TheShard” event after the summer?
