AI Journey2024: Next-Gen Automation Apps are Coming!

At this point, we are all familiar with the capabilities of RPA and have a cursory understanding of what AI is doing or may do to revolutionize the modern workforce. Most of the world’s top companies have some form of RPA running. With the proliferation of UiPath and Power Automate in particular, essentially every worker who has at minimum a Microsoft Office 365 license can build workflows that can automate their desktop and use an off-the-shelf version of CoPilot which can also provide answers and guidance using ChatGPT. While this sounds very exciting, and one may think the automation revolution is finally here, or is it?  

I would counter to this point that the majority of ROI from RPA and AI has primarily come from Unattended or Back Office Automations. Technically, between UiPath and Microsoft alone, there is most likely a “robot for every human” available for a majority of the world’s desktop business users. Whether they know this or are allowed to use it is an entirely different question altogether. While I think the concept of Citizen Development is powerful, I think the rollout can be laborious and generally loses steam if not properly managed. Think for a moment; how many Excel users write macros and/or complex formulas, not many. That’s where I think this interaction of Citizen Development will reside until an adaptive learning tool with a proper amount of governance is created. We are not there yet.

RPA and AI promise that they will make a knowledge worker's life easier so they can focus on higher-value tasks. My thought is we have minimally accomplished this globally. Some companies have adopted automation across the enterprise and shown huge value, but a majority have not. At this point, I have thoughts on why this tech stack hasn’t taken off yet.

• Companies aren’t realistic or have the forethought to plan for the short-, medium-, and long-term goals of intelligent automation.
• Choosing to Build vs. Buy instead of Buy vs. Build.
• Massive tech debt both from consulting firms and staff that have left the company.
• Most importantly… not providing true desktop and mobile applications that automate their day-to-day and create an effortless experience for data gathering purposes.

Challenge: The posting of checks is an extremely complicated but mission critical process for healthcare providers.

A large provider with 16 Orthopedic Clinics and 49 surgeons had been struggling to keep up with the daily requirement of posting substantial amounts of payments. Timeliness is essential and the burden on the current staff was of major concern. After an exhaustive selection process, CampTek Software was chosen to build and provide continued support for the automation of this critical process.

Presently a staff of 20 people go through their daily work queues to make sure these remittances get posted in a timely and accurate manner. The process has a large amount of business rules and exceptions that need to adhere to and accounted for. Not only is this a challenging workflow but trying to maintain a fully trained staff to keep up with it was a problem due to the current state of the labor market.

As part of this daily process, Full Time Employee’s (FTEs) had to manually update Epic with claim status from Availity. The average number of claims was 54,000 per month.