Hyperautomation Explained: RPA and AI
Key Points
- Jamil Spain, IBM Cloud developer advocate, introduces “hyper‑automation” and explains his habit of breaking complex terms into smaller parts to understand them.
- He defines the prefix “hyper” as meaning “extremely,” “beyond,” or “going the extra mile,” setting the stage for an elevated level of automation.
- “Automation” refers to technology‑driven techniques that streamline tasks, and hyper‑automation combines multiple such techniques for greater efficiency.
- The talk highlights two core components: Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which uses bots to perform repetitive data‑entry tasks, and AI/NLP, which enables systems to interpret and act on human language.
- By integrating RPA with AI/NLP, organizations can achieve true hyper‑automation, executing complex workflows with minimal human intervention.
Full Transcript
# Hyperautomation Explained: RPA and AI **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-KTd0uRNq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-KTd0uRNq8) **Duration:** 00:10:21 ## Summary - Jamil Spain, IBM Cloud developer advocate, introduces “hyper‑automation” and explains his habit of breaking complex terms into smaller parts to understand them. - He defines the prefix “hyper” as meaning “extremely,” “beyond,” or “going the extra mile,” setting the stage for an elevated level of automation. - “Automation” refers to technology‑driven techniques that streamline tasks, and hyper‑automation combines multiple such techniques for greater efficiency. - The talk highlights two core components: Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which uses bots to perform repetitive data‑entry tasks, and AI/NLP, which enables systems to interpret and act on human language. - By integrating RPA with AI/NLP, organizations can achieve true hyper‑automation, executing complex workflows with minimal human intervention. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-KTd0uRNq8&t=0s) **Breaking Down Hyperautomation** - Jamil Spain walks through the term “hyperautomation,” dissecting the prefix “hyper” to illustrate its sense of excess and how it frames the concept of going beyond standard automation. ## Full Transcript
hello my name is jamil spain developer
advocate with the ibm cloud and today's
topic that i want to discuss is
hyper automation
now i'm the i'm the product of two
parents that had a long career in
education so naturally in my household
growing up when we didn't understand
something the first instinct like a word
was to break it down to the smaller
parts here i wanted to kind of do this
exercise with you today as we analyze
this word and and the second thought as
technologies you're going to see a lot
of terms that occur
here and there so it's helpful to kind
of understand the context so get a good
method to understand context just by
breaking it down to different con
different parts so let's take the first
part the hyper
now with
hyper
as an adjective that can naturally mean
that you are extremely
and stick that in there start with the
typo extremely active uh for which what
you're kind of working with uh so you
can say like something is um well
it's kind of used to describe the word
hyper but then you have the other
context of it being like a prefix like
hypersensitive uh hyperactive and that
kind of means um
kind of like uh uh
beyond
or kind of above
and these are all from merriam-webster
and hyphenw.com
one of my favorite places that i like to
do so we kind of use that context here
to really kind of understand
what it kind of looks like so we're
really talking about
above
being very excessive or going the extra
mile with automation now
automation another word you can't just
really break it down that way but we
know from technology that the automation
really applies to
uh some techniques to facilitate
automation from a technology perspective
and let's go through a few of those from
what we kind of learned from these other
videos and i'm just going to summarize
it here and then we'll put the two
together for a small use case to show
how we can be hyper
how we can hyper automate all right made
a little verb there all right so the
first is
the word uh rpa
so you have rpa one of the most popular
techniques here
all right i would try to write all that
out but let's say the robotic process
automation
there it's the process of using using
bots
to accomplish uh redundant tasks all
right so
the most popular way is that you have a
website that you want to kind of do the
repetitive tasks of data entry i can
feed a bot a json object or some data
payload and it takes that information
and does the process of filling out a
web form which hereby gives me data
input there so bots do
hey
one of the scenarios that can happen uh
there as well
so we have a second use case for
ai or nlp so that's using artificial
intelligence or natural language
processing which is generally the
process where
it's pretty much making systems
understand
human language
abbreviate that there uh so i can feed
it a sentence and then kind of
understand some context of what i'm kind
of referring to and making some decision
based upon
that particular context that we're
talking about now we did a video i did a
video on business rules you may want to
check that out but that brings up my
next topic of
bpm or
i'm going to abbreviate it as business
rules but we'll say the bpm is business
process management when we went through
the business rules video we kind of
discussed how you can have certain
template sets of actions in place
so again i feed it a data payload or
some type of
data that describes a particular
workflow that i'm going through and
based upon it i have preset actions that
will execute
based upon the information that has been
supplied so definitely being able to
actually
make decisions
all right based on the data
okay and lastly
in this context of automation and
building these cool tools you're going
to have something
usually a loco no code ui so you'll have
the circumstance where i'm able to
really
orchestrate
an experience using
different amounts of these tools
with a particular interface that helps
me kind of build this and really
accelerate the way i can build these
processes and go from there another
thing with the bpm at some point i can
make decisions not just how to process
data but i can make decisions on when i
need human interaction as well
and because we kind of go through in
building these type systems they can be
reused in many different contexts here
so we define the hyper
which we know going above and beyond
let's use the positive aspects of there
and then we have the what facilitates
automation from that
perspective so hyper automation putting
them together is
using one or more of these methods
okay we've gone above and beyond we're
not using one we're using a series of
these in our workflow to accomplish a
task
so let's take a look at what something
like that might mean and when i sat and
i said okay how can we illustrate
something that really defines this
i have kind of seen some particular
scenarios that i think may apply here so
let's take the process that i've seen
maybe of you renewing your license and
i've seen many systems kind of
facilitate that process a very
repetitive task definitely that needs to
scale out across many many different
people and although we love going to the
local driver licensing office and
standing in line it's a perfect activity
to be facilitated through hyper
automation let's break it down here and
prove my point here um so let's say that
to start off
you'll have uh maybe some let's add one
more piece here
one thing you can do with ai is having
bots
that
intake data
okay reason i mentioned that because my
this use case is definitely going to use
that here so let's say that we start off
by having a chat bot
and i'm going to be at my computer and
you tell me that in order to
to be able to renew my license i have to
first
interact with a chat bot
we're just going to ask me a series of
questions
that um it's going to use a little bit
of
natural language processing to
understand my requests okay
it's going to probably ask my
registration
what's my
title or maybe my license id
use that interpret that to go back and
make queries to understand
what is going on there
and from that state
it helps then useful to kind of process
me into a
a bpm or some process engine or a
business rules
where i can say that i need to actually
um
maybe say uh is it active
all right has it been a little while if
so maybe i need to route you to talk to
someone or maybe i want to check
secondary systems
maybe i want to check to see if you have
a safety inspection filled out on file
already or
i want to check with other agencies to
maybe uh maybe you want to check with
deaf records to see if there's someone
that is
deceased and not and not actually alive
so maybe to check for fraud or any other
circumstances there just throwing out a
couple of scenarios there but i can make
decisions to route you in a certain way
um or actually take your data that
you've given me and ask you more
questions and then take that build me a
full object that i can then pass off to
maybe some robotic tasks here maybe uh
the system that we use to actually order
the new licenses or new registrations
may be a legacy system so instead of
paying someone to fill out paper forms
send that data in mail it or fax and
then they have to manually enter it into
a system i can use the chat bot to under
ask questions using nlp to get the right
data set that i then need to feed into a
bot
which can then fill out the process
and
next thing i know
a week later my license arrives now this
is just one example of a use case that
you can do but you can definitely see
how all these elements can kind of work
together and most importantly having a
low code user interface to orchestrate
that whole process and have the
visibility and operational aspects there
to work but definitely take a look at
any of these methods um definitely
learning or being hyper
uh being able to hyper automate yourself
requires you to have some context of
these different areas but put them
together and i'm interested to find out
what you can create for your next
project thank you for your time
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