Powering the potential of the digital workforce

Blue Prism's Digital Workforce simplifies the adoption of AI within business processes and enables the practical use of AI within the enterprise, via a simple "drag and drop" approach. Blue Prism's software robots can run on premises or in public clouds, while being the only RPA vendor to offer certified reference architectures for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an ever-expanding market and demand for intelligent robots that can automate back-office work has never been higher. Forrester forecasts the RPA market to reach $2.9 billion by 2021, a subset of the $48.5 billion broader AI enterprise spend.¹ However, a predominant limitation enterprises are confronted with is that the scale and variety of tasks these robots can automate is dependent on the limited amount of process data at their disposal.

"RPA has breathed new life into business operations by speeding up processes, increasing access to crucial data and digitizing workflows. However, as this capability becomes the norm, further value must be realized by integrating software robots into emerging AI platforms," said Phil Fersht, CEO and chief analyst at HfS Research. "Blue Prism has to take the lead in developing the next phase of intelligent RPA, and this new suite of APIs with the leading AI platforms helps create that capability. Being able to bring back office operations close to the core business is a critical part of the Digital OneOffice, and HfS view this move as a big step in the necessary direction to solve this operational digital jigsaw."

"Many enterprises currently face the challenge of moving AI beyond the experimentation phase and into operationalization," said Sarah Burnett, Research Vice President at Everest Group. "Companies need well integrated platform capabilities that can enable AI solutions at scale. There is growing demand for combining RPA and AI to extend the scope and scale of business process automation. Blue Prism is addressing this demand through its new API integrations with leading cloud AI partners via a package of Visual Business Objects (VBOs) and supporting documents. This should complement Blue Prism's exiting and well-established RPA capabilities and speed up users journeys to intelligent automation solutions."

With the availability of Blue Prism's new cloud integrations, joint customers now have access to key automation tools including natural language processing, translation and visual recognition, all available via RESTful APIs that vary in capability based on the cloud provider that provides the API and toolset. These APIs provide the ability to process unstructured data from any source - for example an email, or document. Newly supported features include the following:

• Microsoft Cognitive Services: Text Analytics API - Sentiment Analysis, Key Phrase Extraction, Language Detection
  Computer Vision API: Extract Text (OCR), Handwriting Recognition (English only), Landmark Recognition
  Translator Text API: Language Detection and Translation

• Google Cloud Platform: Cloud Natural Language API - Syntax analysis, Entity Recognition, Sentiment Analysis, Content Classification
  Cloud Translation API: Language detection and translation
  Cloud Vision API: Detect objects, inappropriate content, extract text (OCR), Label detection, log detection, Landmark detection, image attributes
• IBM Watson: Natural Language Understanding API - extract concepts, entities, keywords, categories, relations and semantic roles. Sentiment Analysis. Multi-language support.
  Language Translator API - Detect and translate text. Customize translations using your own terminology and language.
  Visual Recognition API: Analyze images for scenes, objects, faces, colors or inappropriate content. Extract text (OCR). Customize Watson for your own use case.
• Amazon Web Services
  Rekognition Service: Video and Image analysis. Detect objects, faces, people, unsafe content. Extract text (OCR)
  Comprehend: Extract key phrases, sentiments, and topics across domains including Finance, Health, Media, Telecom, education and Government.

Users can also manage automation of these intelligent software robots from a single platform that includes non-repudiation functions for all collected logfiles, making this centralized control of all RPA processes well suited for regulated industries.

"Automation and artificial intelligence are becoming deeply embedded within the day-to-day operations of the modern workplace," said Dave Moss, CTO and Co-Founder at Blue Prism. "Industry leaders are now realizing that Intelligent software robots are no longer a luxury but a integral part of most organizations' digital transformation strategy. Blue Prism's API integrations with AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Watson and Microsoft Cognitive take this technology to the next level and open the door to a myriad of new, and more sophisticated use cases for RPA. This access to top cloud providers' capabilities gives Blue Prism customers a significant competitive advantage with a higher degree of success and faster rate of return on their digital transformation initiatives."

These new API integrations come as a result of Blue Prism's Technology Alliance Program (TAP) which provides reference architectures for Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google and IBM Cloud (MAGI-C) to support enterprise investments in Cloud, virtualization, analytics and emerging AI platforms. They also increase the value of existing RPA integrations for joint customers by allowing more complex workloads to be more efficiently automated.