Balancing Autonomy and Trust to Enable Intelligent Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a maturing technology that sits between the fields of Business Process Management (BPM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). RPA allows organizations to automate high-volume and repetitive tasks performed by human operators. These tasks are enacted using a software (SW) robot that works on the applications’ user interfaces (UIs) as the original human operators did. The current generation of RPA tools is driven by predefined rules and manual configurations made by expert users rather than intelligent solutions, making the current practice time-consuming and error-prone. In this talk, we focus on a recent line of research devoted to leveraging the combined use of process mining and reasoning about actions in AI to evolve RPA from a mere automated technology to a (framed) autonomous solution capable of complex decision-making activities. In this journey, we also conceptualize the notion of trust between humans and SW robots by discussing the research challenges to pioneer new trust-aware solutions that work in partnership with the human workforce and strike the right balance of autonomy and trust for achieving intelligent RPA.