The Future of Business Process Outsourcing: RPA

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) refers to an innovative software – commonly known as a “bot”- used to execute repetitive tasks that are typical for white collar jobs, such as data entry, processing, and analysis, across multiple IT systems. Like traditional automation, RPA can help improve efficiency in almost every sector, helping execute tasks faster and at a lower cost.

Today, digital transformation is the number one priority for many organizations, which means RPA is one of the fastest-growing enterprise software applications within this trend. The AI powered technology allows machines to see, hear, and think as humans do, and to effectively solve both repetitive and complex task. Today more than $200B are spent on Business Process Outsourcing worldwide annually, and RPA has the potential to take a significant share of this spend as the market is rapidly shifting from outsourcing work to humans to outsourcing it to software bots.

According to Gartner, currently, UiPath is the leader in the RPA industry with its over 7000 enterprise customers. By combining Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning, UiPath’s RPA software allows organizations to automate processes which are then executed at a fraction of the cost and time previously spent. What makes UiPath unique is the use of software bots which accurately emulate human actions and automate millions of repetitive office tasks, increasing productivity and freeing up millions of working hours of capacity. UiPath is leading the “automation first” era worldwide by allowing business leaders to scale digital business operations at unprecedent speed.

Another big player in the RPA marketplace is WorkFusion, used mainly by banks and other financial players. WorkFusion allows these companies to automate, optimize, and manage repetitive operations via its AI-powered Intelligent Automation Cloud. The AI powered technology allows bots to read and understand complex documents containing unstructured data, and digitize, classify, make decisions, and extract data from them while minimizing fraud and data theft risks. Most importantly, the bots learn from each new document and activities previously executed, thereby continuously increasing, and improving their level of automation.

The RPA market is soaring from its market size of $250million in 2016 to $2.9billion in 2021, growing at a 63% 5-year CAGR. RPA can become a cornerstone in almost every industry: from finance, insurance, logistics to healthcare. As reported by McKinsey, 60% of all jobs could have at least 30% repetitive, tedious tasks that could be automatable. Automation could replace between 9 to 26% of such activities by 2030.

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The information in this article should not be regarded as a description of services provided by Delian Partners SA. The opinions expressed in this article are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or on any specific security or investment product. It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry. The views reflected in this article are subject to change at any time without notice.

How is AI impacting the healthcare industry?

In the wake of the pandemic, the demand for better healthcare services is rapidly increasing. A smart hospital refers to a combination of artificial intelligence, cloud technology, and connected devices utilized to enhance patient’s care services and optimize hospital’s workflows. The objective is to create a connected ecosystem to provide patients with the best experience while allowing hospitals to increase their operational efficiency.

Healthcare startup Subtle Medical has developed a deep learning-based application which enhances images during the acquisition phase of the radiology workflow and improve hospital's productivity by reducing work hours for diagnosis. The company uses NVIDIA’s Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to improve PET image quality and shortening the image recognition pipeline, from 10 minutes to 10 seconds per patient.

Intel also uses AI based applications to make healthcare services more personalized, connected, and smart. Through Natural Language Processing (NLP), Intel is accelerating the development of telemedicine: In the next years for doctors, it will be normal to visit a patient remotely or to keep automatically note of a visit, uploading it directly into the Cloud. The combination of Telemedicine and AI will help smart hospitals to systematically analyze patients’ real-time data and to respond quickly to emergencies, as AI software can analyze data quicker than humans and more rapidly identify medical issues before they become calamitous.

Also, tech giant Apple is working with hospitals to make it easier for patients to share information with their doctors: Through the Apple Watch, people can share their health data with doctors and keep these recorded in a dashboard accessible through the app. Apple collaborates with many institutions to establish the clinical accuracy of Apple Watch features by continuously upgrading its software and technology, showing that the cardiac metrics it monitors is as good as clinical tests.

Smart hospitals are disrupting the healthcare industry. As reported by MarketWatch, the smart hospital market is expected to be around $77.80B by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 23.5% over the forecasted period. Technology can enrich people’s lives, and AI – including machine learning, deep learning, etc.- plays a critical role to reach this goal. By combining innovative infrastructure and smart technologies, it will be possible to create a metaverse where patients' health can be constantly kept under control and hospitals can respond quicker than ever to emergencies providing more personalized treatments.

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The information in this article should not be regarded as a description of services provided by Delian Partners SA. The opinions expressed in this article are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or on any specific security or investment product. It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry. The views reflected in this article are subject to change at any time without notice.

Live Streaming is Replacing Traditional Media

Even if live streaming has been around for many years, it experienced a tremendous acceleration during the pandemic as people spent on average 30% more time engaging with their smartphones and media devices.

As technology and media consumption remains higher than pre-covid levels, the success of Live Streaming is growing on a global scale. One of the sectors in which it has been more successful is e-commerce: E-commerce consumption accelerated by three years during the pandemic, and the increased competition in the virtual space worked as a catalyst, pushing companies to improve their users’ online experience and catch their attention.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba was the pioneer of Live Streaming in e-commerce. Through the Live Streaming platform Taobao, Alibaba created a new personalized shopping experience, connecting companies with roughly 800 million monthly users who visit Alibaba’s e-commerce site. Taobao’s range of products available in live streaming has been growing massively and the platform is expanding its offer to those categories previously available only offline, such as cars and large appliances.

Live streaming has also become a key feature in the social media landscape. With 2.6 billion downloads, 1.6 billion worldwide users (including Duoyin), and 800 million monthly active users, TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms ever. What makes TikTok unique is its AI algorithm. Once a video is uploaded on the platform, the AI algorithm uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze and categorize the video – including audio, hashtag, and images, which allows TikTok to provide users with highly targeted content that they find most interesting. In this way, TikTok’ content can engage its new users for up to 10 minutes, which is three times the capability of Instagram.

Another example is the Amazon-owned platform Twitch, which hosts 91% of all video game streaming and provides the content of more than 4 million broadcasters, monthly. In a high-competitive video games landscape, Twitch differs for the “Just Chatting” category: Streamers can engage with the community and talk to viewers even when they are not playing any game. To understand the impressive growth of the platform, consider that Twitch peaked at around 1.7 billion hours watched in November 2020, versus Facebook’s all-time-high of 250 million in September.

The live streaming market can become the largest entertainment medium. As reported by TechJury, the global live streaming market is surpassing the traditional media ecosystem - such as TV or social media- and it is expected to be worth over $247B by 2027. The growth trajectory is supported by a secular shift in consumer habits, considering that 63% of people aged 18-34 watch live streaming content regularly.

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The information in this article should not be regarded as a description of services provided by Delian Partners SA. The opinions expressed in this article are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or on any specific security or investment product. It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry. The views reflected in this article are subject to change at any time without notice.