UK

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.

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.