As robotic process automation (RPA) platforms evolve, they usually come up against a significant obstacle, one that’s dogged the interaction between humans and computers since the latter became widespread in the enterprise: unstructured data.

That’s a technical term that suggests a random scattering of information but, in reality, it just refers to any data that’s presented to a silicon brain (or bot) that’s in an unexpected format.

In most business functions, that occurrence is more common than you might imagine, because although we like to think of modern software and systems as ‘smart’, it doesn’t take much to present information in such a way to a platform or service that will produce an error message or — perhaps worse — incorrectly interpret data that causes problems.

Finance Departments in any size of business, for example, often employ staff to manually handle paper invoices, purchase orders, requisition notices, and so on.

The Situations Vacant newspaper pages and employment websites are full of roles like “Data Input Clerk”— a shorthand for someone that can read-off information and type it into a computer.

Even electronically submitted forms pose issues, like when a customer uses a non-Western character or attempts to format a response unusually.

Unstructured data is of vital importance when considering automation solutions because otherwise smoothly running routines and data movements can glitch or pause as information passes from specialist app to app, from database to website, and so on.

Here there’s often a wait for a human to get involved in untangling what seems to be (to the silicon brain) a real mystery. In some RPA platforms, these types of automation routines are known as “attended bots”; those which are reliant on an employee’s input.

RIP RPA, and hello IAP

Recognising the limitations of first-generation RPA platforms (e.g. automation of discrete tasks only, limited data ingestion), a new industry solution has come to market automating the entire business process – not just discrete tasks. Data is the most critical component in an automation journey, and many enterprises struggled with accessing unstructured or inferred data, and images.

Enter AntWorks^TM. AntWorks’ ANTStein^TM SQUARE platform delivers more than RPA. Its founders looked at solving automation challenges not from a technology perspective but from a business process perspective — helping its clients take advantage of automating processes by providing a data-centric, end-to-end intelligent automation experience for enterprises whose end goal is straight-through processing. The invention is an alternative to OCR, called Cognitive Machine Reading (CMR) using fractal science to solve for the data challenge.

Powered by fractal science, ANTstein^TM SQUARE understands every data type that businesses work with, whether structured or unstructured. ANTstein^TM SQUARE ‘s proprietary Cognitive Machine Reading (CMR) engine lets it works right across many different data types specific to different departments. At a top-down view, CMR code can be used to address every system in even large and highly complex organizations. This makes the automation process simpler, less resource-intensive, and more cost-effective.

The AntWorks technology as stand-alone software was awarded multiple accolades in the last few years, but it’s the business benefits that will resonate with the Tech Wire Asia readership. By being able to rely on data’s integrity, the business can make real-world decisions and more accurate predictions.

Automations take place using both structured and unstructured data from disparate sources in formats and languages that would otherwise need significant human (and therefore costly) involvement.

And what’s more, the learning cycles required are shorter than those exhibited by first-generation RPA. Information flows between systems with advanced decision trees navigated easily and based on always increasingly reliable data.

The benefits of fractal algorithms

As the world’s first and only Integrated Automation Platform (IAP) powered by fractal science principles and pattern recognition that understands every data type, ANTstein™ SQUARE empowers enterprises by automating complex business processes end-to-end. It is a full-stack solution that enables non-technical business users to automate all business processes quickly, easily and in a scalable manner. The superior accuracy in unstructured and image-based data curation, including handwritten extraction, image recognition, and signature verification with its fractal learning technology is a strong differentiator.

Cognitive Machine Reading (CMR) is able to read structured, unstructured, image and inferred data, whether it is printed or handwritten text, or image data such as notary stamps or signature verifications. It can also undertake natural language modelling, processing and generation. CMR can harvest structured and unstructured data and processes the data efficiently, learning it in such a manner that it can automate entire business processes without human assistance and produce actionable business insights. This means businesses can fully automate operational processes while also significantly reducing human error, enabling staff to focus on more strategic and creative tasks. This makes CMR a tangible, all-in-one solution that can rival any other RPA tool and revolutionise the AI and automation industry.

To learn more about the Integrated Automation Platform, and how to plan and build integrated automation capabilities in your organisation, download this report on Scaling Integrated Automation by AntWorks in collaboration with HFS Research.