The old adage ‘all men are created equal’ cannot be indiscriminately applied to robots either, not even to software robots. This is so because, in order to keep up with industrial development, in particular - with the growing complexity and connectedness as trans-industry features, automation must pursue a more nuanced path.

A prime distinction that can serve as an illustration of this increasingly intricate nature of automation is the one between attended and unattended automation. It is best practice to deploy these two strains of automation in concerted fashion for maximum gain, where ‘maximum gain’ can be defined in terms of productivity and efficiency. But how is one to contrast attended vs. unattended robotic process automation (RPA) robots?

Unattended RPA robots do not require human involvement in the processes they perform, since they can be automatically prompted by specific events, or they can be pre-programmed. They are most qualified when it comes to task-heavy back-office activities, such as batch operations, e.g., entering new client information into the applications that require client data. Attended RPA robots, on the other hand, are typically used in front-office activities, nested on user desktops. Human employees work side by side with these bots - indeed, they attend the bots.

Call centres are good examples of how these robots can streamline the workflow. Attended bots are very convenient for the telecom sector because they can offer real-time process guidance and assist agents involved in customer calls by, e.g., locating client data in one application, and entering it into another. The agent can thus fully attend the clients and promptly address their concerns, without getting distracted by data searches.

In the RPA demonstration video below, you can see how an UiPath robot can be used to assist a call center agent through both identification and triage, through the use of a single user interface.