David Essex: I'm David Essex editor at large at
SearchERP, here for a transatlantic discussion
with my colleague Brian McKenna of London based
computer weekly, and Bob De Caux, Vice President of
AI and RPA. At IFS, Bob explains what makes AI
truly intelligent. And how robotic Process
Automation draws from AI, but differs from it in
important ways. To hear the full interview with
Bob De Caux. And learn more about the roles of AI and
RPA in ERP, click the link above. Bob, thanks very
much for joining us, I thought we might start with
some definitions of terms, I'm wondering what you
would say makessoftware intelligent as opposed to
being something that's almost mechanical, thats
just sort of basically rules based?
Well, I mean, it's always what comes down
to the definition of intelligent, but we think of
the hard coded rules that they're set in stone,
they don't change, they don't adapt. So I think
that's a big part of what intelligence is, you
know, the ability to adapt, and, and learn and to
find, you know, deep complex patterns in data
maybe itself without the needing to be hard coded.
And I think how you represent that knowledge is
also a measure of intelligence, you know, rather
than just the IF THEN rules, as you said, it could
be more complex hierarchies, it could be
relationships with, with different strengths, you
know, similarly to how the brain works. But, you
know, moving towards what a proper intelligent,
you know, artificial general intelligence would
be, where you can take all that knowledge and
apply it to general problems, do proper planning
and strategizing, I don't think we're, we're at
that stage with software yet. So I think, you
know, learning, absolutely representing knowledge,
yes. But but not, you know, fully towards solving
all different types of problems still needs
guidance.
Bob, your your job title extends to RPA robotic
process automation, you said about, you know,
machine learning biggest subset of AI is is RPA, a
subset of AI? Or is it a more traditional tech?
RPA is a difficult one, because it undoubtedly
features a lot of AI in the work that it does. But
I think the AI is necessary, because it's trying
to solve a traditional problem in a traditional
way, it's effectively trying to replicate how a
human interacts with the system, you know, in
terms of the clicks they're making, and the
processes they're following. But by trying to
follow that through, they're doing it effectively.
And so by by taking that approach, and trying to
replicate a human, you have to solve a lot of very
complex problems that do use AI, you know, you
need almost a computer vision, you need to
understand what buttons on a screen look like, you
need to be able to handle uncertainty of whether a
user meant to be pressing A or B. So there's lots
of uses for AI within RPA. But is it solving a
problem that artificial intelligence should really
be applied to? Not really for me, I mean, it's
it's really trying to solve is trying to automate
a workflow. And you can, you can do that using now
in my opinion, often more effectively. So system
integration tools right there, just being able to
make sure that systems can talk to each other via
API, so they can communicate, they can pass data
more effectively. RPA is a good way of set sitting
over the top, as I say, in replicating what a
human does, it's quick and easy to set up. I'm not
sure it scales that well, and is particularly, you
know, robust, because if the process changes, or
even if you know, I think a big one, what if the
human wasn't doing something in the best possible
way? You know, what if you're replicating an
inefficient system anyway, that's not a
particularly good approach. And it would actually
make more sense to just try and automate that
workflow and perhaps apply some machine learning
or reinforcement learning to that process against
some metrics. Is this the best way of doing it?
Could I have done it in fewer clicks? Could I have
done it in a more effective way so that know, my
customer is waiting less time on the phone? And so
I think RPA if we break that down, Process
Automation is, is key. And we do a lot of that
within ERP software. You know, we're always
looking to automate processes and you say, it's in
my job title. It absolutely is, but I think it's
evolving more towards automation and process
automation than than our RPA. RP is very much
about how different systems talk to each other.
And for us as an ERP vendor, we absolutely need to
make sure that we make it as easy as possible for
other systems to talk to us to get data in to be
able to communicate to perhaps you know, bundle up
our API so that it's clear how someone could, you
know, send an invoice in or or import some data
from a particular program. And but the extent of
us dealing with RPA doesn't really stretch outside
the boundaries of the RP. So Process Automation
within our ERP. Absolutely, but I wouldn't call
t RPA particularly. So yeah, I've come across as
little bit of a skeptic on this. I think it's,
t's a good way for people to get up and running
ith automating processes, but I don't, I don't