In America, some frontline workers battling the coronavirus crisis aren’t being given any time off. They’re nose to the grindstone, around the clock without so much as a toilet break or a cup of coffee to keep them going.
Even in these strange times, it sounds like the sort of slave labour that would trigger global condemnation. But these are no ordinary workers. They are, in fact, a new generation of robots created to carry out repetitive back-office tasks that would otherwise be done far more slowly by a human.
The US government is using the computer software created by British technology company Blue Prism for so-called digital workers to process a loan application every 90 seconds to keep small businesses alive. Back in the UK, hundreds of the Warrington-based company’s digital workers have also been deployed in the NHS to take on clerical tasks and allow staff to focus on saving people’s lives.
Vision: Blue Prism’s chief executive and chairman Jason Kingdon has helped secure an extra £100 million
For years, companies such as Blue Prism, one of the largest on the junior AIM stock exchange with a market value of £1.1 billion, have faced an uphill battle to convince sceptics that their robot worker technogy is part of the future amid fears of mass redundancies.
But Jason Kingdon, Blue Prism’s chairman and now also chief executive, thinks the current crisis will prove a turning point. He believes the public, MPs – and sceptical businesses – will finally start to realise how valuable the service can be as firms look to save money without slashing jobs.
He uses the example of the NHS to explain. ‘What this does is allow more nursing and frontline care to take place,’ he says of robotic process automation.
‘You see exactly the same thing with the police and other services using this technology. What these guys hate the most is when they get bogged down with administration.
‘It’s all the logistics behind the scenes. How do you keep up with the paperwork? If you’re a frontline nurse, you deal with all that stuff, you register all of the administration to do with the patient.
‘At the moment that’s largely a manual process. You put a robot in there and you actually get time back for frontline activities and take them away from the paperwork that sits behind the scenes.’
Blue Prism’s NHS workers – many of which were donated by the company during the crisis and now help more than 50 NHS trusts – carry out an array of administrative tasks from managing beds in wards and decontamination scheduling to signing up new staff quickly to help tackle the crisis and sharing respiratory data across agencies.
Its workers have also been tracking cases of Covid-19 in prisons. Last year, the Office for National Statistics found that 1.5 million people were at risk of losing their jobs to automation. Tech bosses have argued that the Government needs to do more to train workers to use technology so they are not left behind when it is commonplace.
But Kingdon, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, argues that these digital workers will not displace staff, but create new roles and increase productivity.
‘We don’t see digital workers being a replacement for human beings. We don’t see it as a zero sum thing where it’s 100 digital workers in and 100 people out,’ he says.
By Blue Prism’s reckoning, the business of the future will be made up of a third humans, a third digital workers, and the final third existing IT.
Giant corporations such as Coca-Cola, Telefonica and Npower already use its robots.
It might sound like complicated tech only for computer whizzes, but Blue Prism’s robotic software is actually designed for the average person. Kingdon says it should be as easy as operating Windows – not like cracking the Enigma code.
‘It’s automation technology, but it’s aimed at operational business users. So not people with technical degrees or backgrounds, it’s aimed at generalists,’ he explains.
‘Any systems can be used by these digital workers. Anything becomes operable by these so-called robots. The way we do that is we get the piece of software to mimic a human being. It does this by reading the screens and using the user’s interfaces in just the same way a human would. You have a piece of technology which is like a human being – you show it what it is you want it to do and then it can carry out those actions in the same way.’
This is how the company has been helping the US government process loan applications for small businesses. The government sets the criteria and Blue Prism’s robots verify whether or not an application is suitable using artificial intelligence – and then issue it.
They are helping process mortgage holidays in the UK, but Kingdon says the company would love to be doing more here to help small businesses. His calls have fallen on deaf ears though.
‘We’ve been trying to get through to the various relevant people to say we might be able to help,’ he says.
‘We think there’s a lot more we could be doing in the UK. We’ve tried, we’re putting various proposals in, specifically around these schemes to support businesses. HMRC – we’d love to be helping them.’
Kingdon, a computer scientist by background, has been involved with Blue Prism since 2008 when he joined as executive chairman.
He then took a backseat when the company floated in 2016 to focus on other things, including launching a nonprofit programme for AI research start-ups with University College London, helping the brightest PhD students turn ideas into companies.
But he has now returned full-time and taken over as chief executive from founder Alastair Bathgate, who remains an adviser.
‘He’s been doing this job for 19 years so nobody’s going to begrudge him some downtime!’ Kingdon jokes.
It means Kingdon has taken on the job during a huge crisis, but he doesn’t appear daunted by the proposition and seems eager to take on as much new work as possible.
The company certainly has capacity to help more after it became one of the first firms to tap shareholders for more funds. It is now armed with an extra £100 million, which was a resounding endorsement of the company and its technology, Kingdon says.
‘We still think this market’s right at the beginning and that these digital workers are going to become very commonplace. And Covid-19 will put a spotlight on this.’
It’s undoubtedly something plenty of companies will be thinking about as they navigate their way through the downturn.
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