Cognitive Process Automation – On a platter

NLPBots is the world's first Cognitive Process Automation platform. There are over 180 processes currently being automated using the platform. Processes that needed cognition hitherto only available among humans. When we combined NLP with AI we were able to build that cognition into enterprise systems and have created use cases ranging from AI assistants for employees to report generation for marketing insights.

Classification of processes by stakeholders

Let’s just take a group of processes from the entire gamut of enterprise processes. These enterprise processes can be classified by verticals or functions. Normally that’s done because IT systems are made and sold that way for the last 50 years! Let’s take HR processes for a services enterprise. Here we will have an HCM or HRMS that keeps track of the employee, every time he / she shows up, or doesn’t, needs leave, or who he/she reports to, or makes a claim for an expense incurred for the enterprise, etc. Now if that employee is in Sales he / she will also be connected to various sales related processes like number of leads generated, volume of the sales funnel, targets etc. There will also be shared services, meeting rooms to be booked, learning and development, upskilling, etc. The CPA can automate all of these processes by removing the dependency on humans to perceive the request (made in natural language), initiate the process, retrieve information from unstructured data (Policy, SOPs, etc), pull push data into any of the systems (HCM, CRM, LMS, ERPs, etc) and post execution even give feedback to the relevant stakeholder. Since for the first time we have a platform that cuts through verticals and functions we can choose a simpler and far more effective classification of processes. We take the stakeholders. A stakeholder / user first approach has many advantages.

• It helps clubbing of processes based on the user that most benefits from it.
• It gives that user that omnichannel availability he/ she needs to make his / her life simpler.
• Any department can create use cases that automates their processes relieving humans in the loop that may have been non essential in the first place
• System can generate insights based on individual and group interactions.
• Even users can be connected with each other via a common platform to achieve more.
• The classification can be universal and will apply to every industry vertical

So broadly we classify all processes under Customer centric processes and Employee centric processes. Also there are other stakeholders like management, vendors, franchisees etc and we will cover them in future blogs. For the purpose of this article I am taking just the Employee Centric processes.

Employee centric processes – For those enterprises that care!

Today several enterprises understand how critical it is to let employees do their jobs! To do that we have to make every other part of their lives friction free as possible. So at Mahindra and Mahindra (winner of SAP Ace award for employee engagement) every employee has an AI assistant that helps them with almost every need of theirs from syncing calendars, to leave applications, from finance numbers to payslip downloads. The key is one AI assistant that can trigger or help humans execute over 76 enterprise processes! You can find the complete list of employee centric processes that have been automated on the NLPBots platform. The same assistant helps conduct dipstick surveys and instant notifications. It’s the holy grail of employee engagement!

Pre Covid 19 we thought that one of the most important reasons employees work in the office is that colleagues are just a few cubicles away. Being close to workers dramatically increases productivity. Working from home, employees cannot walk over to their colleagues’ desks. Hence working from anywhere but an office was considered impossible.

Today, however, employees working from home can communicate as seamlessly with each other as they could while in office thanks to collaborative platforms like Teams, Meet, Slack etc. The NLPBots AI assistant is available across all these channels from where employees can trigger these processes.

Broadly within employee centric processes we have the following types of processes:

1. Queries – these could be generic like “what’s the maternity policy in my company?” or specific to my band like “If I were to travel to Mumbai, what’s my daily travel allowance?”. These queries get resolved by the CPA doing a natural language search within the unstructured document repository (Corporate policy, etc). There can also be specific queries like “what’s the status of my expense claim that I raised for my mumbai trip in May?” or “how many vehicles did we sell in June?”. Here the CPA triggers a process that pulls data from a structured data source like Salesforce or Oracle.
2. Transactions – These processes are either initiated via chat or voice in natural language or sometimes the human in the loop needs to react to push it down stream for further processing. Example “I want to apply for casual leave for the whole of next week” Here the system will have to a) understand that employee id XX is asking for casual leave from Date A to Date B and then b) confirm what it understood with the employee c) check it there is enough casual leave balance and ensure that its not violating any policy for XX c) inform XX if not or else inform approver if there is leave balance d) provide approver additional information along with the approval request e) understand and confirm the approvers action, etc. All the while it’s pushing and retrieving data from databases and various systems.
3. Surveys and Competitions – Here the system triggers the process based on events or action. The responses are collected from the employees and pushed into a system or an excel and computed.
4. Other processes – these include processes like authentication, notifications, 3rd party systems (employee mental health) etc.

Omnichannel and versatile

The versatility of the platform also extends to the channels of deployment and systems of unstructured and structured data sets. We have great IP when it comes to unstructured data, where you can upload and train your entire knowledge base as it is. No more manual intent creation and classification. This means that apart from creating better employee experiences at lower costs you can actually integrate data silos and start generating great insights. So far the NLPBots CPA platform has successfully integrated with various intranets, Whatsapp, HTML pages, Workday, Slack, Skype, Skype for business, Teams and various other chat and collaborative platforms. The use cases and channels are not limited to the above.

When it comes to employees, they have a common pool of data (usually HR policies, Standard operating procedures, etc..) and some of the policies could be role specific. Based on the employees role in the organization they have various systems and data governed by different policies and privileges. With the NLPBots CPA platform you have a mechanism to add the data and workflows applicable to specific roles and create an AI assistant that is personal to each of the employees in the organization covering all the aspects of their work like. For example a IT security manager in a particular location will have access to data and work flows of general employees, data and works flows applicable to managers as well as his/her IT security role specific functions through a single window. You can adapt the workflows, permissions and data privileges in the organization directly on the CPA platform to create a enterprise AI assistant that helps every employee with Cognitive Automation.

All of these aspects and many more make NLPBots CPA Platform a really powerful tool when it comes to building cognitive abilities within employee centric systems. Of course this is just a tip of the iceberg. Imagine the possibilities when we open it up for integration with other systems and solutions out there. It means that any new vendor you onboard if they have a solution for your employees and a system with an API that service will also be available through the same window. And any other intent classification system out there will collapse as for those systems this will mean not only configuring the new use case but also going back and reworking the older utterances for previously classified intents as the confusion matrix will go through the roof.

Deep tech meets powerful UI

This is only possible when you take superior NLP Algorithms, train with lots of data on Transformational AI neural networks and make it consumable on a great intuitive UI. So now OEMs, SI partners, Developers and even SIs can access the tech and create use cases that automate employee centric processes like KYC updation, Claims, Attendance regularisations, Approvals, Insights generation and many more.

It’s true, now more than ever before that the happier your employees are the better the yield. So as organisations are battling productivity issues while getting their employees back to work to produce and sell their products or services they’ve got to stay motivated and productive. For employees it means removing all hurdles to their performance. When the systems are able to take care of the mundane, repetitive tasks they do that require them to do it just because the enterprise systems couldn’t, it frees them up to do the real thinking. It helps sales teams to sell better, HR teams to empathies with employee problems better, Operations to optimize resources better and the entire enterprise to deliver more. Cognitive process automation platforms help the employees “see” better, “read” better and act with decisiveness on their core tasks. The classic case of employee – AI collaborating to achieve much more.

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