For years, companies in the robotic process automation, or RPA, space flew under the radar. Software that can automate repetitive, rules-driven, back-office tasks was not exactly an attention-grabber.

Yet, companies in the RPA field, such as UiPath Inc., are gaining more visibility, in part because the field’s artificial intelligence potential could make a major difference in digital transformation.

“No one ever heard of them three years ago,” said Craig Le Clair (pictured, left), vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “I just got this sense there was a way that companies could make progress in digital transformation and overcome the technical debt that they had.”

Le Clair spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the UiPathForward Americas event in Miami Beach, Florida. He was joined by Guy Kirkwood (pictured, right), chief evangelist at UiPath, and they discussed use cases for automated processing of unstructured data and the importance of AI tools in furthering the growth of RPA. (* Disclosure below.)

Insurance company channels email

Growth opportunity for RPA vendors revolves around ways that customers are integrating AI to handle large flows of unstructured data. One such company using RPA is The Hollard Insurance Company Ltd, South Africa’s largest privately owned insurance group.

“They’ve used a combination of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit plus IBM Watson, and it’s orchestrated by UiPath,” Kirkwood said. “That’s dealing with utterly unstructured data — 1.5 million emails that the organization gets in a year. They’ve managed to automate 98 percent of that so it never sees a human, and the reduction in cost is 91 percent per transaction.”

While RPA can make a major difference in processing tasks such as a huge volume of emails, there is still pressure on companies in the space to integrate AI technology and further enterprise adoption.

“I like the concept of RPA as a platform that can lead to more intelligence and more integration with AI components,” Le Clair said. “RPA will be a flash in the pan unless it starts to embed these more learning-capable AI modules. I think it has a very good chance of doing that, particularly now with all of the investment coming into the category.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the UiPathForward Americas event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for UiPathForward Americas. Neither UiPath Inc, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE