Spotlight

Today the virtual trade mission between the Netherlands and France has started, focusing on cooperation in the field of AI. Mona Keijzer, State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Cedric O, the French Minister of Digital Affairs, will kick off this morning. An important goal of the trade mission is to arrive at a European response to the lead that China and the United States have in AI.

This summer, Vasile Tiple was appointed Head of Legal Automation at UiPath, providing companies with the leading enterprise platform for automation. A logical step in his career, as he previously led the legal department of UiPath into the Legal Automation Program. A program of which he himself was a sceptic at first, but soon after the first repetitive process was automated, he became an ambassador for using robotic process automation (RPA) for legal work. Now he’s leading the industry into the legal automation era.

Cruise and General Motors on Tuesday announced they have entered a long-term strategic relationship with Microsoft to accelerate the commercialization of self-driving vehicles. The companies will bring together their software and hardware engineering, cloud computing capabilities, manufacturing know-how and partner ecosystem.

Without a doubt, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) was already on the radar of many UK businesses at the start of last year. Simon Perks, Head of Robotics and AI at a UK digital transformation consultancy called Agilisys, for example, claims to have been working pre-pandemic with a client that’s used the approach to cut the time needed to assess a claim from 15 days to just 24 hours–which means that whereas a person would previously need 12 minutes to process a form, their new virtual worker assistant is able to do it in three.

The majority of workers (nearly three-quarters) are open to having robot assistants help them with everyday work, and what’s more, many are interested in getting involved in creating bots, either by themselves or as part of larger teams. Workers’ needs sharply contrast with decision makers, however, who disagree with each other about whether there is a benefit to using robots across their workforce (42% agree vs. 58% that disagree).

Legal tech, according to Jeroen Zweers, vice president of the European Legal Tech Association (ELTA), is about a digital transformation, set in motion by customer demand. A transformation which frees up lawyers for complex cases and delivering self-services to clients. ‘For example, contracts can be automatically scaled from low to high risk. Only the high-risk contracts need to be reviewed by the legal department, which saves you a lot of time.’

Test automation, based on a solid strategy, keeps the company viable and guarantees quality. By automating repetitive bulk tests, human testers get more room to increase the quality even more. Even though processes run faster, companies shouldn’t have the illusion that they are saving money per se. Rather, they will get more value for their money.

John Deere has been honored in the Robotics category of the 2021 CES Innovation Awards, which recognize outstanding product design and engineering in consumer technology products. This is the second straight year John Deere has received a CES Innovation Award.

Energy Systems Network (ESN) and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS), organizers of the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), unveiled at CES 2021 the official racecar that will be autonomously driven by scores of university teams in the world’s first high-speed, head-to-head autonomous race at the Racing Capital of the World on Oct. 23, 2021.

Ultimately, it’s about people, not technology. It has become clear again in 2020 that technology and innovation are not an end goal, but tools that are used to achieve a business or social goal. That is one of the recurring themes in the conversations we have had for Rocking Robots this year.