What’s In a Name?

By Todd Michaud, HuLoop CEO

Job elimination—that’s what often comes to mind when people think of automation. The relationship between employees and automation has historically been adversarial. When business leaders promote automation, employees could be conjuring up thoughts akin to “Skynet”, the fictional artificial intelligence (AI) from the Terminator movies where robots are locked in an ongoing battle for survival with humankind.

Businesses need automation, and for automation to succeed, employees must embrace automation, otherwise it will fail.

When an automation platform is built around the understanding that employees are both valuable and irreplaceable, companies gain the dual benefits of intelligent automation and human contribution. We get it! That’s where HuLoop comes in. We named our business HuLoop precisely because our mission is to deliver human-in-the-loop intelligent automation.

Workers have historically had a “friend vs foe” view of automation. And it’s hard to blame them when someone is thinking, “Do I want a robot taking over my tasks?” Today’s companies, however, aren’t in a position to shed jobs. With unemployment at an all-time low, organizations are struggling to hire, train and retain employees—not to mention the additional costs that come with employee turnover.

Workers have become increasingly valuable within organizations. As a result, employers are driven to ensure employees are content and find their work meaningful and rewarding—all while balancing the need to increase productivity and reduce tasks and expenses that don’t add business value.

Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI)-based, no-code intelligent automation helps relieve employees of mundane, repetitive, and sometimes mind-numbing tasks. HuLoop provides the digital assistance and support that help transform jobs from tedious to making more valuable use of human capital.

Corporate business processes are made up of hundreds, if not thousands of these often repetitive and mundane tasks and activities that must work across disparate enterprise software platforms, data sources and organizational boundaries. HuLoop’s hyperautomation platform helps organizations increase productivity, reduce expenses and optimize human capital by doing the following:

• Eliminating non-value adding tasks or activities
• Automating mundane, repetitive tasks with bots
• Facilitating intelligent document handling
• Orchestrating across existing enterprise software
• Providing Human-in-the-Loop governance

By providing an AI-based, no-code intelligent automation platform, HuLoop empowers both technical and non-technical users to inject human emotional intelligence and decisioning into critical business functions. The automation capabilities include:

• Data-Driven Process Discovery – Generates understanding of people, processes, and technologies are being used and what happens in between them.
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – building, deploying and managing software robots aka bots or digital assistants that emulate what humans would otherwise need to do.
• Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) – loading, digitizing, classifying, extracting, redacting, validating and exporting intelligence from documents and files.
• Business Process Automation (BPA) – orchestration and automation of complex processes across disparate systems.
• Intelligent Data Automation (IDA) – collecting, validating and publishing data automatically.
• Software Test Automation (STA) – creating, executing and analyzing an array of tests comparing actual expected outcomes.

AI-based intelligent automation brings speed, accuracy and rational execution to processes and tasks. It replaces boring, mundane job functions while dramatically improving job productivity and quality. But there’s a lot artificial intelligence can’t do.

Artificial intelligence is not intuitive or culturally sensitive. It can’t replace strategic thinking, emotional intelligence or empathy—and it certainly isn’t creative or imaginative. As its name represents, HuLoop is built to keep “humans-in-the-loop” and at the core of a company’s automation initiatives.

While automation centers around planned execution, known behaviors and following rules, HuLoop understands that humans can understand a given situation—and respond accordingly—in ways that automation systems can’t. The HuLoop hyperautomation platform looks for places to inject human involvement, which helps to ensure not only system adoption, but better outcomes overall.

Humans are essential to every core process and as a result, HuLoop empowers employees to provide both system governance and decision-making as part of the automation process.

• Governance – humans are critical to ensuring an automation system is performing, executing and finishing properly.
• Decision-making – humans provide the necessary intuition and judgement to automation initiatives that only further enriches outcomes.

Automation software alone can only take organizations so far. Consumers are far too familiar with the following customer service scenario: an automated phone tree or online chat bot attempts to provide important information needed about a missing order. But what happens when a change to the order is needed? Or a credit or discount for the inconvenience is requested? That’s when the human element is needed. Humans can turn an ordinary customer service experience into extraordinary.

Automation works well in knowable, predictable environments and situations. But as we all know, life—and business—can be unpredictable. HuLoop provides organizations with the improved speed, accuracy and productivity they need, while incorporating the human element to ensure the business is successful when nuance is needed.

The next generation of technology is not focused on automation vs people, artificial intelligence vs human, friend vs. foe—but rather, on the harmonization of both. Like its name indicates, HuLoop is the best of both worlds, enabling organizations to benefit from both intelligent automation and human experience seamlessly and simultaneously.

If you are interested in learning more about the HuLoop Hyperautomation platform, or if you wish to see a software demonstration, please click here.

As President and Chief Executive Officer, Todd P. Michaud leads HuLoop’s strategy and oversees its execution. He is an accomplished, results-oriented, and high-energy technology executive with a sustained track record for driving breakout growth and building enduring, software businesses. Whether launching successful startups, scaling growth phase companies, or turning-around mature software businesses, Michaud succeeds by building and leading high-performing, multi-cultural, and global teams. Before HuLoop, Michaud has held executive roles at DemandTec, Hypersonix, Symphony Retail, Amdocs, NCR Corporation, Retalix, Revionics, IDS LLC, and IBM Corporation.

Based in the Sacramento, California area, HuLoop Automation offers an AI-powered, no-code intelligent automation platform. This platform brings next generation hyperautomation innovation across a number of key solution areas: 1.) process and task discovery, 2.) business process automation (BPA), 3.) robotic process automation (RPA), 4.) intelligent document processing (IDP), 5.) software test automation (TA) and 6.) intelligent data automation (IDA). HuLoop is used across the enterprise by both businesspeople and technology experts. The platform delivers significant revenue growth, cost savings, and productivity gains across it’s prestigious customer base. Learn more at www.huloop.ai and follow HuLoop on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.