What is Intelligent Process Automation? A complete guide for 2024

Intelligent process automation (IPA) enables organizations to adopt agile operating models by integrating robotic process automation with AI, analytics, OCR/ICR, and process mining. This approach empowers businesses to enhance their operations and respond proactively to evolving market and business dynamics. IPA facilitates the development and implementation of new end-to-end processes across various domains, leveraging the advantages of underlying technologies to automate diverse functions, from finance and accounting to customer support.

Flexible intelligence for comprehensive orchestration

In today’s IT and business landscapes, integration is key for IPA tools, as they must interact with diverse data sources and technologies. To facilitate this, backend extensibility is essential, which can be achieved through workload automation solutions, enterprise job schedulers, or service orchestration platforms. These solutions offer universal connectors and APIs, enabling seamless management of data and dependencies across disparate systems, enabling end-to-end processes. With the support of the appropriate data and infrastructure, IPA tools empower IT teams to create innovative workflows spanning from the data center to end-users or customers.

Utilizing AI and ML in Intelligent Process Automation

Integrating AI and ML into intelligent process automation (IPA) expands its capabilities beyond traditional RPA tasks. AI enables IPA platforms to analyze both structured and unstructured data for NLP, intent detection, and other cognitive tasks, empowering users to design complex workflows for chatbots and customer interaction. Unlike RPA, which automates existing tasks, IPA allows for process reimagining and optimization using deep learning and intelligent decision-making. ML algorithms within IPA platforms analyze historical and real-time data to optimize processes instantly and in the future, automating workflow routing and problem remediation. However, process design and optimization are just one aspect of IPA's broader scope.

Advantages of Intelligent Process Automation

The primary advantages of intelligent process automation include efficiency, optimization, and innovation. Automation of routine tasks saves time for employees. Machine learning algorithms continuously optimize processes for further efficiency and productivity gains. Business and IT users can exploit new technologies to innovate solutions and enhance the customer experience.

According to a recent McKinsey study, organizations implementing IPA have achieved significant results:

• Automated more than 50% of manual tasks
• Decreased process times by 50%
• Realized ROIs exceeding 100%

Examples and applications of Intelligent Process Automation

IPA tools streamline repetitive business processes, allowing employees to focus on cognitive tasks. This boosts efficiency, productivity, and cost savings across various industries like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing.

• In finance, IPA enhances customer support by automating data collection from multiple sources, improving the customer journey.
• In insurance, IPA reduces data entry time by extracting information from claims forms and transferring it to the CRM, enabling faster processing and enhanced customer service.
• In shipping, IPA analyzes shipping data to optimize routes and schedules, minimizing delays and maximizing resource utilization.