Unstructured Data is Not an Insurmountable Challenge for RPA

By: Rita Roy Choudhury, AntWorks

It is estimated that while 80% of all data is dark or unstructured, it will rise to 93% by 2020.   In an IDC survey, 76%of respondents reported that the inability to analyse current data inhibits their ability to take advantage of business opportunities. Classical RPA platforms leverage an old technology called Optical Recognition technology. This technology, as the name suggests, uses character recognition to convert unstructured data to structured data. This technology has severe limitations. It reads data with an accuracy of only 50% at best. This results in stalled RPA processes.    AntWorks proprietary Cognitive Machine Reading (CMR) technology depends on a bouquet of technologies including pattern recognition. Just like we humans read words which is a collection of characters, so also does the CMR technology read a bunch of characters to understand, contextualize data to take subsequent actions.

There are five types of  data:

• Structured                     spreadsheets
• Semi-structured          invoices
• Unstructured              emails
• Inferred                        Married/Unmarried
• Image                            photos, check marks,

The evolution of RPA to intelligent automation is inevitable.  At present, the world generates nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Almost 90% of the data available today has been generated in the past two years.  Unstructured data is the fastest growing form of data.   Social media posts, customer-generated content, and enterprise assets such as white papers, emails, and more are a veritable gold mine that companies are missing out on. Companies that aren’t taking advantage of it are missing important insights that can impact their bottom line. While RPA is a mere transport layer that is used to move data between systems, users all over have come to expect much more from RPA.  Given the prodigious volumes of data being produced daily, RPA systems will have to inevitably become more intelligently cognitive