Her resume is stellar, she’s nailed the interviews and now the company is ready to get that new hire on board. And so begins a series of human resources procedures that are nothing short of monotonous.
Create an employee file. Set up the payroll. Get a badge for building access. Keep the new hire updated throughout the process via email.
What that soon-to-be employee may not realize, though, is that the new employer may not be chatting them up on Gmail or Outlook, personally.
A bot may be doing it. Or in other words, robotic software.
“All of these different steps could be [five to] 15 different systems to onboard a person,” said Larry Honig, chief digital officer at Techstra Solutions, a Squirrel Hill-based startup creating these bots as part of a process called “intelligent automation.”
It’s all about automating repetitive procedures that can be as dull as dishwater.
Mr. Honig says all of this onboarding work, for example, can be done in five to 10 minutes by a team of bots, while it may take hours or days for humans.
Don’t fret over your job just yet, said Jennifer Honig, CEO of Techstra.
The idea isn’t to replace a company’s current workers, but to free them up for the kinds of tasks that are uniquely human, like face-to-face interactions.
“Initially, it’s a little bit scary [for the employees],” she said. “But they actually get more positive types of feelings over time. We’re empowering employees to do more important types of jobs.”
The market for cognitive computing solutions in HR is set to increase over the next three years, according to a 2017 report by IBM, the computing firm based in Armonk, N.Y. That study encompassed the opinions of over 400 chief human resources officers.
Sixty-six percent surveyed believe cognitive computing can drive added value in HR departments and about 40 percent expect to adopt some intelligent automation in their own business in the next few years.
‘Not about replacing people’
To understand intelligent automation, which leans on artificial intelligence to make judgment calls, it’s important to understand the underlying technology, called robotic process automation, or RPA.
Robotic process automation isn’t exactly a brand-new technology, points out Paul Cavnaugh, an executive partner at Gartner in Chicago. It’s been around for at least four years.
He’s helped implement such platforms at a company he has worked for, though he couldn’t comment the specific firm for confidentiality reasons.
“I think it’s become more mainstream of late in terms of companies that are adopting it,” he said. Now, the challenge is to scale it.
UiPath, a Bucharest, Romania-based software company that has specialized in robotic process automation platforms since 2005, says there are a few key precursors to that technology that began in the late 1990s.
Screen scraping software is essentially a way for bots to extract data from websites. Even if a site has unstructured data — meaning there’s no real organization of the figures or words — a bot can transform those into something useful by finding a pattern.
This is the kind of technology that powers websites like Bellevue, Wash.-based Expedia, which helps customers find the cheapest flights and hotels.
The software can simply check out other websites’ prices, scrape the data and catalog it in one place. It’s just not “intelligent” and cannot handle full onboarding processes for companies.
While screen scraping or even robotic process automation is not usually the sole disruptor of an entire industry, it does shift behavior, fundamentally changing job roles or eliminating them for some new function.
Consider the parallel decline in travel agents as websites like Expedia and Travelocity have become more popular.
The number of people in the U.S. employed as travel agents has declined from 132,000 in 1990 to about 81,700 by 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2026, the bureau expects a decline of another 9,500.
Many of these travel-booking sites actually do employ travel agents in call centers. And while there’s certainly no surplus of brick-and-mortar travel agencies like you once saw on Main Street, there are still firms that help book complicated trips for clients with multi-leg tours or firms that specialize in corporate booking.
Tomorrowland for today’s work
Mr. Honig of Techstra describes his company’s offerings as “bot plus.” Intelligent automation goes beyond robotic process automation, he said.
In the human resources scenario, Mr. Honig runs a demo that shows a mouse clicking around on a screen, opening new windows and putting employee information into spreadsheets and forms. It’s as if you’re watching a coworker complete the work by looking over her shoulder. But it’s a bot.
The underlying rules the bot must follow look a bit like a flow chart and each little box has some algorithmic code behind it — some computer instructions that tells the bot what to do.
Say an email comes in from your new hire. That ticks one box, which may then tell the bot to look for attached documents and search for key phrases. It’s mining that data in seconds, Mr. Honig explained.
The intelligent system can find errors, like incorrect insurance numbers or parts of a form that aren’t complete. It can then request more information by generating an email.
The bot will process the form, which would normally be sitting on an HR professional’s desk. The system can go into PeopleSoft, a human resources management system, to set up the person as a new employee, filling in information about their address, who they report to and which country they’ll be working in.
For every bot that a company uses, it can do the work of 15 people, Mr. Honig said.
While he did not disclose specific costs for a Techstra bot, he said the industry at large charges businesses between $5,000 and $25,000 per bot.
Techstra is not the only company that creates custom intelligent automation systems.
A popular competitor is Blue Prism, a Warrendale, England-based software company that builds out automated solutions for companies like Walgreens, Siemens and Heineken.
For its part, Techstra is a relatively small company with about 20 to 30 employees. Usually, Mr. Honig said, the company works with about five to 10 customers at a time since they’re usually large enterprise firms.
Most of those clients have been outside of Pittsburgh, Ms. Honig said. She and her husband have found the community here to be a bit risk averse over the past seven years they’ve been running Techstra.
“I always remember other CEOs always having to go outside of Pittsburgh to companies ... willing to take a risk in trying something,” she said. “I think Pittsburgh was just much more conservative and traditional.”
Over the last year or two, Techstra has started to market its services more locally.
Mr. Honig said he has seen surprising reactions from local customers.
“A lot of them think it’s a tomorrowland,” he said. “Once they understand it, their brain starts to explode with opportunity.”
Courtney Linder: clinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1707. Twitter: @LinderPG.
First Published: April 15, 2019, 12:30 p.m.
