People aren’t made for staring at spreadsheets all day. It gets repetitive fast, which makes it easy to lose focus.
Chicago’s Novatio Solutions wants to automate such tasks with “digital workers.”
“Look at the evolution of work: 25 or 30 years ago in the automotive industry, a lot of people were doing mechanical and physical work like putting doors on cars, screwing on wheels and airbrushing,” said CEO Gokul N. Solai. “Today, a lot of the repetitive work people do is digital.”
While major companies like Amazon are investing heavily in automation, Solai said a lack of resources keep many smaller companies from reaping its benefits. That’s the problem his company wants to solve.
Unlike traditional automation tools, which often rely on integrations, Novatio’s “digital workers” interact with the customer’s computer systems through the graphic interface in the same way a human user would. The software can easily switch between different tabs and applications, including web-based software.
Solai said this approach makes Novatio’s robots easy to adapt to new use cases.
“We don’t have to write any code or access any APIs,” said Solai. “We teach our robots to move the mouse to a certain area to extract information, just like you would train a human to do it. That way, we’re able to deliver on a project in a matter of weeks rather than years.”
Solai said his team arrived at the digital worker approach after several attempts to create automation tools through APIs. Not infrequently, the team found that the tools or APIs they used had become outdated before their automation tools were finished.
One of the primary use cases for Novatio’s solution is the employee onboarding process. Before starting, employees usually need access to a range of software and other logins.
“How that usually works is that someone from the HR department will send an email asking for information, and then the HR person has to manually use that information to sign up for those accounts,” said Solai. “Our digital workers can make sure all the information is right, confirm the details against other documentation and move data onto the necessary platforms.”
In addition to being faster than manual data entry, Solai said using a robot for a repetitive task brings the error rate down to zero. It also makes it easier to increase capacity at times of high demand without having to lay people off is business slows down.
But Solai does not think his digital workers will replace actual humans.
“Humans are really good at reasoning, customer-facing activity and otherwise connecting with people on a personal level,” he said. “Digital workers can’t do that, but they’re really good at computer vision, processing data and crunching large numbers of data. So it becomes something like a hybrid workforce with more capabilities than humans or computers would have on their own.”
Headquartered in Chicago, Novatio Solutions is part of Solai & Cameron Technologies, which has 500 employees across the country.
