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Automation company UiPath announced its 4th acquisition, on August 1, 2022 – Re:infer, a natural language processing (NLP) start-up based in London. Initially founded in Romania in 2005, UiPath is one of the prominent RPA platforms, helping to automate repetitive software-based tasks at companies including Google, NASA, and DHL. After rebranding in 2015, UiPath moved its headquarters to New York City two years later. The company had raised around $2 billion and attained a valuation of $35 billion ahead of its arrival on the public markets in April 2021. UiPath specializes in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology and offers a cloud-based platform that allows businesses to automate operational activities.
Re:infer, meanwhile, is a London-based start-up that was founded in 2015 by University College London researchers. Re:infer employs AI and NLP technology to help enterprises mine text-based communications for data and insights.
By bringing Re:infer in-house, UiPath is moving towards boosting its native NLP capabilities. Re:infer specialises in transforming unstructured information from documents and communications into structured data. This data can then be analysed and put to use as part of a company’s broader automated workflows.
“Automation and AI are a powerful and natural pair that together empower the vision of the fully automated enterprise, Ted Kummert, executive VP of products and engineering at UiPath, said in a press release. “Combining Re:infer’s NLP technology with our Document Understanding and AI products expands the breadth of our current AI-powered automation capabilities and unlocks new automation opportunities for our customers”.
RPA technology is ideal for automating repetitive tasks such as connecting to system APIs, copying and pasting data, and extracting structured content. While Machine Learning engines of the type used by Re:infer can extract insights from language and process unstructured content.
Communications Mining can be deployed where e-mail exchanges and communications-based processes such as tickets (e.g, resolution of problems, sales order), chats, telephone conversations, or notes added on CRM, and ERP systems, are core to the running of an organisation. It works best when there is a high volume of messages passing between colleagues, customers, suppliers, and partners, and where the use of shared mailboxes and systems is prevalent. All that Communications Mining needs to extract value is a large quantity of unstructured data, and people ready to take it through a quick and easy training process. This would empower citizen developers to be part of the AI training cycle. It is easy for non-developers to rapidly train and deploy the optimised data models for your company’s communications messages. This would ultimately bring benefits like improved customer experience (CX) and operational stability.
Communications Mining forms part of a technology stack for intelligent automation and digital transformation. It is important that a Communications Mining tool can easily integrate with other systems such as Process Mining, RPA, Optical Character Recognition, and intelligent document processing. The number and quality of partnerships a given solution has with system integrators, leading consultancies, and technology vendors is a good indication of how easy it will integrate with your existing technology infrastructure.
On top of that, NLP low code software also includes customisable dashboards to monitor and analyse business communications data and workflows, down to the individual message. This provides both historical and real-time reporting allowing you to track communications trends.
This is very powerful because it can lead to running process intelligence in areas where it has not been done yet, in addition to customer support and experience processes like contact centers. For example, enabling you to understand the communications between the agent and the customer.
Re:infer unlocks the value in business communications by mining, monitoring, and extracting context and semantics from the unstructured data found in a variety of communications methods. Then, using ML and NLP technologies, turns those messages and documents into actionable business data. Re:infer is an industry-agnostic no-code solution and it is easy for non-developers to rapidly train and deploy the optimized data models for your company’s communications messages.
Finally, Re:infer’s acquisition by UiPath both strategically and tactically helps automation to become more intelligent by enabling advanced data labeling and context recognition within unstructured data like text and images.
These advancements will be critical for easier identification of automation opportunities and more processes that can be automated. Specifically, the process understanding module’s integration will support more organisations opting to discover and understand the processes that are ripe for automation. Re:infer will, as it integrates into the UiPath platform, allow for the detection of electronic conversations and provide a full analysis of structured data to be processed further by bots.
AMO is a certified UiPath partner, we provide bespoke automation solutions for our customers by leveraging UiPath’s RPA toolsets to solve our customers’ needs. Want to know more about how we can assist you in your digital transformation journey? Get in touch with our team!
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