This blog was written by Rose Azad Khan and Ben Palmer from Evolution AI with Guy Kirkwood, UiPath’s Chief Evangelist.
The technology partnership announced between UiPath and machine reading company Evolution AI has led us to think about some of the benefits of technology (as opposed to implementation) partnerships. Ben Palmer, Rose Khan and I have come up with seven reasons why we think such partnerships are beneficial when customers are extending their RPA deployments.
Have we got them right; are we missing any? As usual, enjoy the slides and please add your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below.
The almost overwhelming explosion of technology means that ideas and products are developed rapidly, and the market can become crowded with multiple variants of essentially the same product set; with subtly different features. With too many companies all offering similar things, it’s good to partner and offers an improved, integrated solution.
Partnerships foster a culture of openness between companies - no one can know everything and it’s extremely difficult to keep up to date with the most cutting-edge developments across multiple fields. By partnering, both technical and industry-specific knowledge can be shared. This openness also contributes to the knowledge economy, hopefully benefiting people and companies outside of the RPA and AI bailiwick.
Partnerships enhance the ability to specialise - different companies have different areas of specialisation and can create product features which complement each other so, it makes sense to pool resources to create solutions that embrace whole industries or categories of work.
There are significant benefits to using familiar names that people already know to showcase technology from a company that people might not know. Maybe people will be more likely to ‘take a risk’ in using a new technology if it’s promoted by an already familiar name, and/or approved by a company whose software they already use.
Partnerships make it easier for companies to make joint offerings of an integrated solution, decreasing the likelihood that customers will need to seek separate vendors in order to integrate a new technology platform or process into their existing infrastructure and workflows. This also minimises effort for their customers; and provides a much smoother path to the adoption of new technologies.
Technology should make life easier (that’s the plan anyway). With RPA and AI, the processes that the technologies enhance are generally those that humans find really boring. Take invoice processing for example; manually re-keying data from an invoice into an accounting software package is dull and repetitive. By combining RPA and AI to deal with the structured, rules-based activities and the more intuitive processes that rely on unstructured data can today be done by using a combination of tools. It is this combination that leads to better user experience and higher levels of employee engagement.
I’ve talked about this before, but Ben came up with a great example of where partnerships make it easier to get to the point where technology happens without you noticing - ordering a takeaway. A couple of taps on a screen and you have the food you want in under an hour delivered to your door. Behind the scenes, you need a phone manufacturer, working with an operating system, a mobile broadband provider, and an app that seamlessly links with your bank account, the restaurant and a nearest available delivery agent. These complex technological integrations all happen without us giving them any thought. This should essentially be the goal for all technology partnerships.
My thanks to Ben and Rose again for taking the time to work on this and, of course, for partnering with UiPath.
You can see the original post on LinkedIn.
