People in Robotics

Many organisations, both in government and in business, now have experience with digital employees. But implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) successfully at an operational level is not the same as taking strategic advantage of this technology. This is where Frank Mester of MvR Digital Workforce sees more and more questions arising, especially now that robotisation has become an irreversible phenomenon.

CFOs are right to look at RPA for bottom line reasons first—but practitioners speaking at last week’s CFO AX webinar on what’s on the digital transformation horizon for Finance teams revealed that automation is actually being influenced by a number of business and non-business factors.

How do you accelerate RPA in the US federal government, an entity with over two million civilian employees across more than one hundred agencies? Gerard Badorrek has tackled this challenge as the CFO of a US Government Agency.  

Leadership, for example by the CFO, is a critical element in successfully automating processes in organizations. RPA pioneer Asher Lake will be talking about this subject at UiPath Together 2022, the largest software event in the Benelux, to be held in a few weeks in Amsterdam. Rocking Robots talked to him about the lessons he learned in automating with RPA at, among others, KLM Air France. ‘It’s all about building a movement in your organization.’

Robot sales in North America reached a record $2B in 2021 driven by urgent manufacturing challenges such as labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and more. The U.S. robotics industry has proven exceptional at meeting demand, according to a report from HowToRobot.com, Gain & Co. and The Association for Advancing Automation (A3).

The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) today announced six winners of the 2022 Engelberger Robotics Awards, the world’s most prestigious robotics honor. At a special dinner in conjunction with the Automate 2022 Show and Conference in Detroit on June 8, Michael P. Jacobs of Applied Manufacturing Technologies (AMT) will be honored for his leadership in automation while Oussama Khatib of Stanford University will be awarded for education and Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics for technology.

The UK is one of the front runners in automation. A lot of companies have moved beyond just RPA, and added technology such as process mining and AI to their business. This change has implications for the involvement of the CFO in IT investments. “The C suite has to not only buy into it even but champion it more than anything else, because they’ve paid for costly mistakes in the past already.”

The role of finance changes from compliance to driving environmental and socially responsible value. And the CFO is at the heart of these changes. One of the instruments to accommodate this change, is robotic process automation (RPA). Steve Faulkner, leading the CFO practice with UiPath, a global RPA technology leader. Rocking Robots discussed with him the challenges CFOs are currently facing.

At the recent CIOFEST CIO conference Martin Bellamy, one of the UK’s most experienced public sector IT leaders, shared some top tips for lasting project achievement.

This week the Council of Europe’s Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) will started its work on the AI Treaty. ALLAI co-founder Virginia Dignum was one of the speakers at the Inaugural Meeting of the CAI (High-Level Segment).