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Our immediate goal should be to set our sights lower; forget ML, instead improve and expand technologies like RPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process
by tragomaskhalos 6y ago
Our immediate goal should be to set our sights lower; forget ML, instead improve and expand technologies like RPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation), which is only "AI" in the narrowest sense.
Example: my wife is an admin in a school office, and a ludicrous amount of her and her colleagues' time is spent on replicating data entry between a multiplicity of different incompatible systems. The Rolls Royce / engineer's solution to this would be to provide APIs for all these disparate systems and have some orchestration propagating the data between them, except of course that's never going to be remotely practical; instead, dumbly spoofing the typing that the workers do into the existing UIs is a far more tractable approach. My (admittedly not 1st person based) experience of these things is that they currently still require significant technical input in the form of programming and "training", but this fruit has got to be hanging a lot lower than any ML-based approach.
- tyingq 6y agoRPA can be a dangerous band aid. It often uses screen scraping or similar brittle interfaces that are known to change. Or, it doesn't know about certain error conditions, etc. Also, if it's been running for months before it breaks, the humans that used to do the work are gone, or have forgotten how to do it.
- ackbar03 6y agoI've always found rpa a very curious thing. In some corners you have people really hyping it and how much value it can bring and everything e.g ui path and other products. But I can never imagine it to be a very good solution, the thing must be extraordinarily fragile and rule based clicking automation is a real pain to put together.
- monkeydust 6y agoDitto always felt like 'poor mans automation' to me but in some fields for some tasks it seems to deliver rapid ROI which is what the C suite love.
- afarviral 6y agoAt my work we are leaning heavily on RPA to automate away drudgery and ultimately reduce expendature. However it has been immensely frustrating, prone to errors and garnered endless suspicion. The experience has been that bots written by the service desk staff doing the job function better and are much more under our teams governance, which the official "automation" teams within our org are painful to deal with due to their lack of availability and not having first hand knowledge of the things being automated. I think the RPA approach requires dedicated people developing and monitoring the bots who have an active part in the process being automated. The difference in approach determines the result.
- tyingq 6y agoI've experienced the same. Centralized RPA teams tend to, for example, do web scraping when they could easily use an existing REST API. Because they either don't know it exists, or don't have that skill set. Similarly, seen things like using a email as a trigger, when the source application has configurable web hooks. Feels like there's an RPA culture of sorts to assume the things being automated only have human based interfaces.
- sitkack 6y agoThe work an RPA does is obvious, you can watch what it does. Your first statement is a trusism, any solution can be a dangerous band aid, if applied incorrectly. RPAs solve real problems now, really the only correct measure. Of the RPAs I have raised, I always watched them work, they just prevent mistakes. I would suggest taking a screen recording and verbally annotating it for posterity. Furthermore, nothing says your RPA has to run open-loop, one can put in checks to ensure that it hasn't gone off the rails.
- toss1 6y agoGood advice - carefully observing the process, annotating successful (& failing) processes and installing post-hoc checks seem like sound practices. Do you have other such practices to recommend? Can you say anything about what your production and testing stack look like (esp the versions that work better)?
- Mvandenbergh 6y agoAgreed. Taking large amounts of admin workers from low productivity to moderate productivity (and RPA can easily boost the productivity of these kinds of tasks, if not the whole job by 200%) has a much bigger effect than hyperoptimising workflows that were already highly optimised.
- ilaksh 6y agoStrange they didn't mention RPA in the article. In fact I think that most of their examples could be addressed with advanced RPA. I also believe that the leading edge RPA systems do take advantage of some real AI techniques. And that more AI will be deployed in RPA as time goes on.