A Conversational Digital Assistant for Intelligent Process Automation

• Published in: Business Process Management: Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation Forum Vol. 393; pp. 85 - 100
• Main Authors: Rizk, Yara, Isahagian, Vatche, Boag, Scott, Khazaeni, Yasaman, Unuvar, Merve, Muthusamy, Vinod, Khalaf, Rania
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2020; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing
• Subjects: Business process automation; Conversational assistant; Interactive automation; Orchestration; Robotic process automation
• ISBN: 9783030587789; 3030587789
• ISSN: 1865-1348; 1865-1356
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-58779-6_6

Robotic process automation (RPA) has emerged as the leading approach to automate tasks in business processes. Moving away from back-end automation, RPA automated the mouse-click on user interfaces; this outside-in approach reduced the overhead of updating legacy software. However, its many shortcomings, namely its lack of accessibility to business users, have prevented its widespread adoption in highly regulated industries. In this work, we explore interactive automation in the form of a conversational digital assistant. It allows business users to interact with and customize their automation solutions through natural language. The framework, which creates such assistants, relies on a multi-agent orchestration model and conversational wrappers for autonomous agents including RPAs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on a loan approval business process and a travel preapproval business process.