AI Magazine December 2020 | Page 67

Q . WHERE DOES IA COME FROM ?
Q . WHAT IS IA ?
Q . WHERE DOES IA COME FROM ?
The industrial revolutions started over 200 years ago , automating blue-collar work in the agricultural and manufacturing industries . They provided massive and structural benefits to our society , such as the reduction of famine and an increase in standards of living . They also relieved people from laborious manual work .
Officially coined in 2017 by IEEE , intelligent automation ( IA ) ushers in a new revolution : that of office work , automating white-collar work . Today , office work accounts for more than 80 per cent of the job roles in our global economy – such as lawyers , financial controllers , or call centre operators . Like the previous automation revolutions , I believe IA will have a significant impact not only on employment but , more broadly , on our society . learning , low-code platforms , robotic process automation ( RPA ), and more . It is aimed at automating end-to-end business processes in a computerised environment . It delivers business outcomes on behalf of the employees .
For example , IA can help to automate most work activities in ‘ procure to pay ’ – from the selection of vendors , sending of orders , reception and processing of their invoices , up to the payment of these vendors .
IA effectively creates a softwarebased digital workforce that enables synergies by working hand-in-hand
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Q . WHAT IS IA ?
IA , also called hyperautomation or cognitive automation , is one of the most recent trends in the field of artificial intelligence . It is a combination of methods and technologies , involving people , organisations , machine aimagazine . com