Intelligent workflows 101: Revolutionizing the way your business works

Basic cognitive services are often customized, rather than designed from scratch. This makes it easier for business users to provision and customize cognitive automation that reflects their expertise and familiarity with the business. In practice, they may have to work with tool experts to ensure the services are resilient, are secure and address any privacy requirements.

In 1959 Texaco’s Port Arthur Refinery became the first chemical plant to use digital control.[37]

Conversion of factories to digital control began to spread rapidly in the 1970s as the price of computer hardware fell. Unfortunately, poor understanding of needs and improper planning can stunt transformation from the start. In fact, our experience indicates that more than half of automation implementations fail to meet objectives and are considered complete failures.

This simplification enables the user to think about the outcome or goal rather than the process used to get that result or the boundaries between applications. Deloitte provides Robotic and Cognitive Automation (RCA) services to help our clients address their strategic and critical operational challenges. Our approach places business outcomes and successful workforce integration of these RCA technologies at the heart of what we do, driven heavily by our deep industry and functional knowledge. Our thought leadership and strong relationships with both established and emerging tool vendors enables us and our clients to stay at the leading edge of this new frontier. IA goes far beyond simple rules-based, mechanist robotic process automation (RPA). Instead, new technologies like natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, and machine learning (ML) are  used to replicate the capabilities of human work — not just automate it.

General-purpose process control computers have increasingly replaced stand-alone controllers, with a single computer able to perform the operations of hundreds of controllers. They can also analyze data and create real-time graphical displays for operators and run reports for operators, engineers, and management. Deploying cognitive tools via bots can be faster, easier, and cheaper than building dedicated platforms. By “plugging” cognitive tools into RPA, enterprises can leverage cognitive https://chat.openai.com/ technologies without IT infrastructure investments or large-scale process re-engineering. Therefore, businesses that have deployed RPA may be more likely to find valuable applications for cognitive technologies than those that have not. But before they can boost ROI through IA, organizations must first identify what — and where — their needs reside, understand how emerging cognitive technologies will impact their chosen systems and have a plan of attack for implementation.

Craig Muraskin, Director, Deloitte LLP, is the managing director of the Deloitte U.S. Innovation group. Craig works with Firm Leadership to set the group’s overall innovation strategy. He counsels Deloitte’s businesses cognitive process automation on innovation efforts and is focused on scaling efforts to implement service delivery transformation in Deloitte’s core services through the use of intelligent/workflow automation technologies and techniques.

Intelligent automation is undoubtedly the future of work and companies that forgo adoption will find it difficult to remain competitive in their respective markets. This blockchain trading solution based on the IBM Blockchain Platform creates a one-stop-shop of real-time information on any trade visible to all parties and triggers automatic payments through smart contracts. Trading internationally can open up new revenue streams and increase profits, enabling a company to increase investment and accelerate its development.

Programmatic vs. scalable learning

These include setting up an organization account, configuring an email address, granting the required system access, etc. Cognitive automation represents a range of strategies that enhance automation’s ability to gather data, make decisions, and scale automation. It also suggests how AI and automation capabilities may be packaged for best practices documentation, reuse, or inclusion in an app store for AI services.

When you’ve found the right people to manage the change, start by taking a step back. We’ll also show you the automations you can take advantage of when you switch to our work management platform, Wrike. PLCs can range from small „building brick“ devices with tens of I/O in a housing integral with the processor, to large rack-mounted modular devices with a count of thousands of I/O, and which are often networked to other PLC and SCADA systems. Technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, and other renewable energy sources—together with smart grids, micro-grids, battery storage—can automate power production.

Cognitive automation may also play a role in automatically inventorying complex business processes. Karev said it’s important to develop a clear ownership strategy with various stakeholders agreeing on the project goals and tactics. For example, if there is a new business opportunity on the table, both the marketing and operations teams should align on its scope.

„The whole process of categorization was carried out manually by a human workforce and was prone to errors and inefficiencies,“ Modi said. Find out what AI-powered automation is and how to reap the benefits of it in your own business. With light-speed jumps in ML/AI technologies every few months, it’s quite a challenge keeping up with the tongue-twisting terminologies itself aside from understanding the depth of technologies.

AI is the perfect complement to RPA, together providing more accurate and efficient automation powered by an informed knowledge base. AI is the process behind the effort to simulate human intelligence in machines, while RPA automates processes that use structured data and logic. Collaboration with a partner established in service and technology can fast-track the process by designing and implementing customized solutions and guiding organizations through the challenges of implementation. They can show not just how to do a task with reduced headcount, but also how to scale across the entire value chain of processes with greater speed, better quality and higher productivity for better business outcomes. Machines with AI and ML cognitive intelligence can process vast amounts of structured and unstructured data with the ability to analyze, understand and learn on the go.

A new connection, a connection renewal, a change of plans, technical difficulties, etc., are all examples of queries. For instance, Religare, a well-known health insurance provider, automated its customer service using a chatbot powered by NLP and saved over 80% of its FTEs. The organization can use chatbots to carry out procedures like policy renewal, customer query ticket administration, resolving general customer inquiries at scale, etc. The modern supply chain is complex and involves multiple stakeholders, making coordination and management challenging. With CPA, enterprises can optimize supply chain operations, improve inventory management, and ensure timely deliveries, ultimately streamlining the entire supply chain process. There is a prevailing belief that emerging AI technologies, such as Cognitive Process Automation (CPA) or Large Language Model (LLM) based generative AI tools would lead to job displacement and workforce anxiety by replacing humans in various roles.

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), a type of intelligent automation, facilitates precise data extraction from diverse documents, simplifying the process of information handling. CPA’s adaptive learning guarantees perpetual enhancement, making it capable of adjusting to changing business environments. By utilizing NLP, IDP, and adaptive learning, CPA tools relieve humans from routine and time-intensive tasks, allowing them to concentrate on more strategic initiatives and promoting a more productive and efficient work setting. It goes beyond automating repetitive and rule-based tasks and handles complex tasks that require human-like understanding and decision-making. By leveraging NLP, machine learning algorithms, and cognitive reasoning, cognitive automation solutions offer a symphony of capabilities that revolutionize how businesses operate.

Robotic process automation

Workers unencumbered by mundane, repetitive tasks are freed to concentrate on more intellectually challenging projects. Intelligent automation can improve systems that make employees’ work lives simpler and more fulfilling. For customers, IPA helps deliver immediate services which, in turn, boosts customer retention and increases overall customer satisfaction. Cognitive automation leverages different algorithms and technology approaches such as natural language processing, text analytics and data mining, semantic technology and machine learning. These tasks can range from answering complex customer queries to extracting pertinent information from document scans. Some examples of mature cognitive automation use cases include intelligent document processing and intelligent virtual agents.

An example of new technology being developed that uses IA to provide greater value to our daily interactions with technology is cognitive automation. Cognitive automation is a progression of IA that uses large amounts of data, connected tools, diagnostics and predictive analytics to create solutions that mimic human behavior. Using natural language processing (NLP), image recognition, neural networks, deep learning and other tools, cognitive automation attempts to mimic more human behavior, including emotional reactions and other natural human interactions. An example of cognitive automation in use is the adoption of robotics to supplement patient care in nursing homes and hospitals. Down the road, these kinds of improvements could lead to autonomous operations that combine process intelligence and tribal knowledge with AI to improve over time, said Nagarajan Chakravarthy, chief digital officer at IOpex, a business solutions provider.

Using relays for control purposes allowed event-driven control, where actions could be triggered out of sequence, in response to external events. These were more flexible in their response than the rigid single-sequence cam timers. The theoretical understanding and application date from the 1920s, and they are implemented in nearly all analog control systems; originally in mechanical controllers, and then using discrete electronics and latterly in industrial process computers. The logic performed by telephone switching relays was the inspiration for the digital computer. The cost of making bottles by machine was 10 to 12 cents per gross compared to $1.80 per gross by the manual glassblowers and helpers. Several improvements to the governor, plus improvements to valve cut-off timing on the steam engine, made the engine suitable for most industrial uses before the end of the 19th century.

There are a lot of use cases for artificial intelligence in everyday life—the effects of artificial intelligence in business increase day by day. New insights could be revealed thanks to cognitive computing’s capacity to take in various data properties and grasp, analyze, and learn from them. These prospective answers could be essential in various fields, particularly life science and healthcare, which desperately need quick, radical innovation. Organizations often start at the more fundamental end of the continuum, RPA (to manage volume), and work their way up to cognitive automation because RPA and cognitive automation define the two ends of the same continuum (to handle volume and complexity). However, if you are impressed by them and implement them in your business, first, you should know the differences between cognitive automation and RPA.

Based on this, we describe the relevance and opportunities of cognitive automation in Information Systems research. Cognitive process automation is reshaping the business landscape by automating cognitive tasks and enabling organizations to achieve unprecedented efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. From customer service to fraud detection and decision support, CPA is revolutionizing various industries and unlocking new opportunities for growth. As organizations embrace this transformative technology, it is crucial to balance the benefits of automation with ethical considerations and human-AI collaboration, ensuring a future where CPA enhances our lives and work. Since cognitive automation can analyze complex data from various sources, it helps optimize processes. Bots can automate routine tasks and eliminate inefficiency, but what about higher-order work requiring judgment and perception?

Teams will seamlessly integrate AI-powered tools into their workflow, optimizing processes and driving better outcomes. With robots making more cognitive decisions, your automations are able to take the right actions at the right times. And they’re able to do so more independently, without the need to consult human attendants. With AI in the mix, organizations can work not only faster, but smarter toward achieving better efficiency, cost savings, and customer satisfaction goals. According to IDC, in 2017, the largest area of AI spending was cognitive applications. This includes applications that automate processes that automatically learn, discover, and make recommendations or predictions.

Ever had a project go completely off the rails and thought, “There must be a better way to organize this chaos! You’re probably already familiar with the basics of automation, but we have three top tips to master it. By automatically assigning people with approval authority to the review stage, you put the task in front of them immediately, with all the information they need to sign off on a job well done.

An organization invests a lot of time preparing employees to work with the necessary infrastructure. Asurion was able to streamline this process with the aid of ServiceNow‘s solution. The Cognitive Automation system gets to work once a new hire needs to be onboarded. The Cognitive Automation Chat GPT solution from Splunk has been integrated into Airbus’s systems. Splunk’s dashboards enable businesses to keep tabs on the condition of their equipment and keep an eye on distant warehouses. Managing all the warehouses a business operates in its many geographic locations is difficult.

CPA’s adaptive learning ensures continuous improvement, allowing it to adapt to dynamic business scenarios. By harnessing the power of NLP, IDP, and adaptive learning, CPA tools liberate humans from mundane and time-consuming tasks, enabling them to focus on higher-value initiatives and fostering a more productive and efficient work environment. Cognitive Process Automation (CPA) is an advanced technological paradigm that leverages artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to automate complex cognitive tasks traditionally performed by humans. It combines elements of AI and automation to emulate human thought processes in decision-making and problem-solving.

This not only enhances the overall speed and effectiveness of operations but also fuels innovation and drives organizational success. The biggest challenge is that cognitive automation requires customization and integration work specific to each enterprise. This is less of an issue when cognitive automation services are only used for straightforward tasks like using OCR and machine vision to automatically interpret an invoice’s text and structure.

We have already created a detailed AI glossary for the most commonly used artificial intelligence terms and explained the basics of artificial intelligence as well as the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence for organizations and others. A cognitive automation solution is a positive development in the world of automation. The way RPA processes data differs significantly from cognitive automation in several important ways.

These enhancements have the potential to open new automation use cases and enhance the performance of existing automations. For instance, at a call center, customer service agents receive support from cognitive systems to help them engage with customers, answer inquiries, and provide better customer experiences. According to experts, cognitive automation is the second group of tasks where machines may pick up knowledge and make decisions independently or with people’s assistance. Businesses are facing intense cost pressures and are operating on tighter profit margins. CPA allows companies to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, minimizing errors, and increasing overall productivity.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Let’s consider some of the ways that cognitive automation can make RPA even better. You can use natural language processing and text analytics to transform unstructured data into structured data. In the BFSI industries, Cognitive process automation tools play a pivotal role in fraud detection and risk management. By analyzing vast amounts of transactional data, AI-powered assistants can identify patterns, anomalies, and suspicious activities. This enables businesses to detect and prevent fraud in real-time, safeguarding their customers’ interests and minimizing financial losses.

Their survey shows that 40 percent of automation and AI extensive adopters plan to reallocate tasks from high-skill workers to those with lower skill levels, enabling more efficient use of workforce qualifications. This transformation not only boosts productivity but also creates a fresh array of middle-skill jobs, often referred to as ‘new-collar’ roles. For instance, with the advancement of technology, data analysts now handle tasks that were traditionally done by statisticians, such as data interpretation and trend analysis. Your automation could use OCR technology and machine learning to process handling of invoices that used to take a long time to deal with manually. Machine learning helps the robot become more accurate and learn from exceptions and mistakes, until only a tiny fraction require human intervention.

With Wrike, you gain powerful approval features so you can bring your process to an end faster, more smoothly, and with fewer requests for revisions. Plus, with Wrike’s exhaustive list of integrations, you can go beyond automating a single workflow. When you choose a map that accurately reflects your process, you’ll be better able to identify the risks to your work and find the best opportunities for automation.

Most businesses are only scratching the surface of cognitive automation and are yet to uncover their full potential. A cognitive automation solution may just be what it takes to revitalize resources and take operational performance to the next level. Besides the application at hand, we found that two important dimensions lay in (1) the budget and (2) the required Machine Learning capabilities. This article will explain to you in detail which cognitive automation solutions are available for your company and hopefully guide you to the most suitable one according to your needs.

Logistics automation is the application of computer software or automated machinery to improve the efficiency of logistics operations. Typically this refers to operations within a warehouse or distribution center, with broader tasks undertaken by supply chain engineering systems and enterprise resource planning systems. Bots forecast loan default, using machine learning and data analytics to create models that predict risk. In addition, RPA can automate the loan approval process and help reduce human bias.

Paradox of automation

‍Roots Automation was founded specifically to bring Digital Coworkers to the market at scale and reduce the barrier to entry to insurance, banking, and healthcare organizations around the globe. Created by leaders at AIG and Mars with decades of automation experience under their belt, the Co-Founders of Roots Automation have pre-built, plug-and-play Digital Coworker bots across Finance, Operations, Underwriting, Claims, Human Resources, etc. You now can streamline and automate your business more efficiently and cost-effectively in a time where every company is striving to get lean and mean. With so many unknowns in the market, profitability and client retention are the goals of nearly every business leader right now. Employ your first Digital Coworker in as little as three weeks and see your break-even point in as little as four months. Read “The Nail in the ‘I Can’t do Automation’ Coffin”Want to learn more about Digital Coworkers in your business?

Developers are incorporating cognitive technologies, including machine learning and speech recognition, into robotic process automation—and giving bots new power. CPA tools primarily contribute to a significant enhancement in efficiency and productivity. By automating cognitive tasks, they can eradicate human errors and reduce manual labor. With automation taking care of repetitive and time-consuming tasks, employees can concentrate on activities that require human judgment and creativity.

The First and Second World Wars saw major advancements in the field of mass communication and signal processing. Other key advances in automatic controls include differential equations, stability theory and system theory (1938), frequency domain analysis (1940), ship control (1950), and stochastic analysis (1941). A production environment — or any environment that relies on vendor relationships — can benefit from IA to analyze and select vendors. IA employs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to gather and analyze data from multiple inputs in different formats and uses data analytics to compare vendor capabilities, reliability and compare pricing. Learn about Deloitte’s offerings, people, and culture as a global provider of audit, assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax, and related services. Cognitive RPA can not only enhance back-office automation but extend the scope of automation possibilities.

By setting the filters and choosing widgets to highlight the most important data, you can set up custom dashboards for your projects, your teams, or even individuals who want to prioritize their tasks. Because all the dashboards in your space draw from a central source of truth, you know your whole team is in the loop and you’re tracking the very latest news on everything they’re achieving. Let’s look at how Wrike’s automation can work at every stage of a business process. As part of this process, you’ll also define the KPIs you’ll use to gauge how well you’re meeting your targets. This will help you prove the results of the automation and make informed decisions about how to develop your processes in the future. When you break down your process, you’ll likely find opportunities to automate it at every stage, from intake to delivery.

• CIOs will derive the most transformation value by maintaining appropriate governance control with a faster pace of automation.
• As CIOs embrace more automation tools like RPA, they should also consider utilizing cognitive automation for higher-level tasks to further improve business processes.
• These tasks can range from answering complex customer queries to extracting pertinent information from document scans.
• According to experts, cognitive automation is the second group of tasks where machines may pick up knowledge and make decisions independently or with people’s assistance.

This assists in resolving more difficult issues and gaining valuable insights from complicated data. To assure mass production of goods, today’s industrial procedures incorporate a lot of automation. The issues faced by Postnord were addressed, and to some extent, reduced, by Digitate‘s ignio AIOps Cognitive automation solution. The automation solution also foresees the length of the delay and other follow-on effects. As a result, the company can organize and take the required steps to prevent the situation. Having workers onboard and start working fast is one of the major bother areas for every firm.

Cognitive automation vs traditional automation tools

Processing claims is perhaps one of the most labor-intensive tasks faced by insurance company employees and thus poses an operational burden on the company. Many of them have achieved significant optimization of this challenge by adopting cognitive automation tools. Although much of the hype around cognitive automation has focused on business processes, there are also significant benefits of cognitive automation that have to do with enhanced IT automation. As organizations adopt Cognitive Process Automation tools and make diverse verticals intelligent, the traditional organizational setup is bound to undergo significant transformations. The shift will be towards cross-functional and team-based work, fostering greater collaboration and agility in decision-making.

In Ptolemaic Egypt, about 270 BC, Ctesibius described a float regulator for a water clock, a device not unlike the ball and cock in a modern flush toilet. This was the earliest feedback-controlled mechanism.[13] The appearance of the mechanical clock in the 14th century made the water clock and its feedback control system obsolete. Figure 2 illustrates how RPA and a cognitive tool might work in tandem to produce end-to-end automation of the process shown in figure 1 above. Intelligent Automation (IA) for short — takes digital process transformation to an all new level. It’s also important to plan for the new types of failure modes of cognitive analytics applications.

These systems have natural language understanding, meaning they can answer queries, offer recommendations and assist with tasks, enhancing customer service via faster, more accurate response times. By automating cognitive tasks, organizations can reduce labor costs and optimize resource allocation. Automated systems can handle tasks more efficiently, requiring fewer human resources and allowing employees to focus on higher-value activities.

„Cognitive automation refers to automation of judgment- or knowledge-based tasks or processes using AI.“ It infuses a cognitive ability and can accommodate the automation of business processes utilizing large volumes of text and images. Cognitive automation, therefore, marks a radical step forward compared to traditional RPA technologies that simply copy and repeat the activity originally performed by a person step-by-step.

The benefits of implementing IPA are well documented, and each manually operated process offers an opportunity to realize gain through digital transformation. Moreover, opportunities for creativity and innovation compound when human capital is freed to drive greater business results. In essence, IA results in creating a technology-based digital workforce that works hand-in-hand with the human workforce to get the job done. Applications and use cases have spread quickly, often delivering up to a 60% impact on business efficiency. Processors must retype the text or use standalone optical character recognition tools to copy and paste information from a PDF file into the system for further processing. Cognitive automation uses technologies like OCR to enable automation so the processor can supervise and take decisions based on extracted and persisted information.

As the maturity of the landscape increases, the applicability widens with significantly greater number of use cases but alongside that, complexity increases too. The human brain is wired to notice patterns even where there are none, but cognitive automation takes this a step further, implementing accuracy and predictive modeling in its AI algorithm. Like our brains’ neural networks creating pathways as we take in new information, cognitive automation makes connections in patterns and uses that information to make decisions. Attempts to use analytics and create data lakes are viable options that many companies have adopted to try and maximize the value of their available data. Yet these approaches are limited by the sheer volume of data that must be aggregated, sifted through, and understood well enough to act upon. But as those upward trends of scale, complexity, and pace continue to accelerate, it demands faster and smarter decision-making.

• That’s why some people refer to RPA as „click bots“, although most applications nowadays go far beyond that.
• When you choose a map that accurately reflects your process, you’ll be better able to identify the risks to your work and find the best opportunities for automation.
• It also suggests how AI and automation capabilities may be packaged for best practices documentation, reuse, or inclusion in an app store for AI services.
• Embracing this transformational era with agility and foresight will empower organizations to thrive in the digital age.

Automation of various tasks reduces the need for manual labor, thereby decreasing operational costs. Moreover, CPA tools can perform tasks more efficiently and at scale, often surpassing the speed and accuracy of human workers. Additionally, CPA eliminates the need for employee training and onboarding in certain areas, further reducing workforce management costs.

Cognitive automation describes diverse ways of combining artificial intelligence (AI) and process automation capabilities to improve business outcomes. Despite the potential of integrating and deriving insights from information across teams, businesses struggle to digitize multiple processes across their organizations. Emerging technologies are reshaping core functions across businesses from supply chains to bill processing.

In this case, an interlock could be added to ensure that the oil pump is running before the motor starts. Timers, limit switches, and electric eyes are other common elements in control circuits. They can be designed for multiple arrangements of digital and analog inputs and outputs (I/O), extended temperature ranges, immunity to electrical noise, and resistance to vibration and impact. Programs to control machine operation are typically stored in battery-backed-up or non-volatile memory. It was a preoccupation of the Greeks and Arabs (in the period between about 300 BC and about 1200 AD) to keep accurate track of time.

For example, they might only enable processing of one type of document — i.e., an invoice or a claim — or struggle with noisy and inconsistent data from IT applications and system logs. As the digital agenda becomes more democratized in companies and cognitive automation more systemically applied, the relationship and integration of IT and the business functions will become much more complex. Cognitive automation does move the problem to the front of the human queue in the event of singular exceptions. Therefore, cognitive automation knows how to address the problem if it reappears. With time, this gains new capabilities, making it better suited to handle complicated problems and a variety of exceptions. It now has a new set of capabilities above RPA, thanks to the addition of AI and ML.

„The ability to handle unstructured data makes intelligent automation a great tool to handle some of the most mission-critical business functions more efficiently and without human error,“ said Prince Kohli, CTO of Automation Anywhere. He sees cognitive automation improving other areas like healthcare, where providers must handle millions of forms of all shapes and sizes. Employee time would be better spent caring for people rather than tending to processes and paperwork.

While RPA considerably enhanced operational efficiency, it lacked the cognitive abilities necessary to manage complex tasks involving unstructured data and decision-making. CPA orchestrates this magnificent performance, fusing AI technologies and bringing to life, virtual assistants, or AI co-workers, as we like to call them—that mimic the intricate workings of the human mind. CPA surpasses traditional automation approaches like robotic process automation (RPA) and takes us into a workspace where the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary. Cognitive Process Automation represents the cutting-edge fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, empowering humans in their work endeavors. With its advanced features like Natural Language Processing (NLP), CPA-enabled solutions can comprehend human language and context, facilitating seamless interactions with users. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), a form of intelligent automation enables accurate data extraction from various documents, streamlining information processing.

„A human traditionally had to make the decision or execute the request, but now the software is mimicking the human decision-making activity,“ Knisley said. „Cognitive automation, however, unlocks many of these constraints by being able to more fully automate and integrate across an entire value chain, and in doing so broaden the value realization that can be achieved,“ Matcher said. With the right automation in place, you can focus on high-value activities, putting yourself in a fantastic position to scale up, optimize, and innovate in your industry. For example, it’s incredibly easy to set up Wrike to send you a weekly report on your team’s progress, with information like the status of the tasks, the team’s overall capacity, and the tasks at risk of missing a deadline.

This means that processes that require human judgment within complex scenarios—for example, complex claims processing—cannot be automated through RPA alone. CIOs are now relying on cognitive automation and RPA to improve business processes more than ever before. One of their biggest challenges is ensuring the batch procedures are processed on time. Organizations can monitor these batch operations with the use of cognitive automation solutions. Predictive analytics can enable a robot to make judgment calls based on the situations that present themselves. Finally, a cognitive ability called machine learning can enable the system to learn, expand capabilities, and continually improve certain aspects of its functionality on its own.

But combined with cognitive automation, RPA has the potential to automate entire end-to-end processes and aid in decision-making from both structured and unstructured data. Cognitive automation can also use AI to support more types of decisions as well. For example, a cognitive automation application might use a machine learning algorithm to determine an interest rate as part of a loan request. These skills, tools and processes can make more types of unstructured data available in structured format, which enables more complex decision-making, reasoning and predictive analytics.

A good example of this is a central heating boiler controlled only by a timer, so that heat is applied for a constant time, regardless of the temperature of the building. The control action is the switching on/off of the boiler, but the controlled variable should be the building temperature, but is not because this is open-loop control of the boiler, which does not give closed-loop control of the temperature. Lights-out manufacturing is a production system with no human workers, to eliminate labor costs.

Competitive advantages that can dramatically elevate business value, scale operations and boost ROI in ways never seen before. Cognitive technologies transform process automation by adding human-like capabilities and intelligence to business operations. Cognitive automation creates new efficiencies and improves the quality of business at the same time.