Gary Flood

‘Bürokratt,’ set to go live this year, will allow citizens to access and use digital public services via text, chatbot and eventually just their voice, says Tallinn

Earlier this month, NICE—which markets RPA under the term ‘Advanced Process Automation’—confirmed that one of its biggest government customers, a major public sector agency in the UK and which it also claims was one of the first significant robot users at scale in the world, had renewed its contract with the firm.

At its ‘Forward IV’ user conference last month, along with other significant partner announcements like its work with Accenture, RPA market leader UiPath singled out its new connection with Ingram Micro as significant. But who is Ingram Micro, and how has the relationship–which started in India in 2018, but only became a global arrangement earlier this year–been progressing?

Set up in 1993 with only 11 employees, Admiral Group is a Cardiff, UK-based insurance company originally only specialising in car insurance, but which now offers a variety of products, including home and travel insurance. It now has 11,000 staff in eight countries, and in its last full financial year (2020) claimed 7.7m customers and £1.31 billion in annual turnover. Impressive figures, but from an RPA point of view is another stat from its annual report: that 500,000 hours have been “given back to the business in automation savings” since the approach was adopted in 2016.

This week, the UK’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) published predictions of the economic benefit to the country out of AI and robotics. And what’s very striking: London sees a much, much bigger possible return out of the former than the latter… and says the robots will take our jobs, but we’ll create new ones instead.

As the NHS faces extreme COVID winter pressures, why isn’t RPA being more aggressively used? Historic suspicion of new systems in the UK’s public health system may be hampering adoption of potentially helpful automation.

Even as Prime Minister Boris Johnson was simultaneously quoting Sophocles and Kermit the Frog to a bemused UN, the latest piece of his government’s post-Brexit plan to make the UK a success now it’s out of Europe was unveiled: a new national “AI Strategy” to boost British business use of AI, attract international investment and develop a next generation of tech talent.

Finnish policymakers think use of a new ‘time data’ system based on tech from a local specialist AI maritime logistics company, Awake.AI, can do everything from improve the competitiveness of the nation’s entire maritime logistics to aiding the environment and meeting a national goal of “efficient and sustainable logistics by means of digitalisation”

How advertising giant Dentsu’s using RPA to “elevate our people’s potential and enable them to do the creative, strategic, and high value work that provides value to clients”

Data-intensive tasks such as managing inventories, processing patient data and scheduling appointments can be handed to software robots, which can process data in a fraction of the time and more accurately than their human colleagues. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can help healthcare systems overcome the challenges of a post-COVID world. We decided to ask Head of Public Sector UK and Ireland at UiPath, Ian McGregor, for more detail.