Automat's Innovation For Enterprise Automation

It is not infrequent for businesses to have to spend high costs on tasks that do not require high-level skills yet are still vastly significant. These include repetitive tasks like replying to customer support emails, handling insurance claims, or managing inventory.

The busywork that tends to become dull and boring over time can unexpectedly contribute to a business’s inability to scale. They disengage and unmotivate employees, potentially reducing morale and productivity, and can be mind-numbing, leading to an increased risk of errors. If carelessness and errors often occur, businesses could lose both time and money in trying to fix them.

Pushing employees to constantly focus on repetitive tasks may also hinder a business from staying innovative, as employees would have no time to develop more salient skills. The negative impact repetitive tasks bring is bottomless, and one way to mitigate this is by adopting automation.

Automat, a Y Combinator-backed startup founded by Lucas Ochoa and Gautam Bose, utilizes robotic process automation (RPA)* to provide workflow automation services to businesses and enterprises.

*RPA: Robotic Process Automation, a software technology that makes it easy to build, deploy, and manage software robots that emulate human actions and interactions with digital systems.

Automation at a Cost

The adoption of AI for automation purposes has become exceedingly uncommon among enterprises. With the widespread options of automation tools that exist nowadays, in addition to their stacking benefits, there’s not much reason for companies not to implement automation in their day-to-day workflows.

Let’s say a customer service representative of a small business has spent hours manually responding to customer emails. Tired and frustrated, they accidentally send the wrong response to the wrong customer. Imagine the amount of money and time spent on providing compensation to customers if this were to happen every other day.

If the business were to automate this task, the customer service representative could instead focus on more complex or strategic tasks that may push them to constantly improve their skills, like building relationships with customers or resolving customer complaints to ensure customer loyalty.

The conspicuous benefits of automation on top of the distinct existence of companies providing RPA services, like UiPath, Blue Prism, and Microsoft Power Automate, show that pretty much nothing can stop companies from embracing automation.

However, depending on service coverage and complexity, RPA services can be costly, costly enough that they may defeat the purpose of lessening an enterprise’s overall costs. On average, services that comprise bots, software agents, license renewals, and maintenance efforts can cost between $5K to $15K per year. Custom RPA tools may even cost enterprises up to $300K.

Automat offers the ultimate solution with its cost-friendly and speedy AI automation.

Performing Automated Tasks and Instructions

Automat, rebranded from its former name, Lasso, created an RPA platform accessible to Chrome users by utilizing large language models and computer vision*.

The platform analyzes text descriptions or video recordings of a user’s workflow in natural language and turns them into step-by-step instructions. Once turned into text and simplified, the instructions will be interpreted and performed by AI. In one example, one of Automat’s bots scraped an email for the clients’ workflow details, looked through one of Automat’s RPA tools, and moved all the information from said email into an organized spreadsheet.

*Computer Vision: A field of AI that enables computers to interpret and understand the visual world, to identify objects, people, and scenes in images and videos.

Automat claims that the platform can automate any PC workflow, which at the moment seems to cover the creation of instructional documents as well as its completion, of various industries.

Amongst its versatile capabilities, the startup says that its AI can perform construction permit submissions, legal document analysis, and insurance claims. In addition to that, the platform’s integration with third-party apps like HubSpot and Salesforce also enables document parsing*.

*Document Parsing: Examining data present in a document and extracting useful information from it.

After users submit their workflow to the Automat team, they can wait for a few days to have the automation built. As of right now, Automat offers two RPA services, one unattended and one attended. The unattended service is a cloud-based version that requires no human oversight or intervention whatsoever, whereas the attended service acts as an assistant that works at the side of a user.

Though Automat is certainly not the first automation company to provide tools for video-to-workflow conversion, it claims that its work is 10 times faster and costs only 1/10th of its competitors’ price.

What The Future Holds

Automat recently finished its pilot program and is currently working with a few of its very first paying customers, said to range from small to medium-sized businesses as well as large-scale enterprises.

The startup raised $3.75 million in seed funding led by Initialized Capital and Khosla Ventures, with plans to allocate the funding to grow its engineering team, recruiting those experienced in the machine learning field. Automat will be building a technical team to perform customer implementations and R&D roadmaps, too.

To further provide its craft’s versatility to its customers, the startup aims to allocate its funds to support the launch of its Sandbox feature, which will allow users to manage workflows and access document and image data extraction APIs.

Meme & AI-Generated Picture

Job Posting

• Automat - Senior Founding Backend Engineer, Full Time - San Francisco, CA (In Office)

• Benchling - Global Scientific Solution Consultant - Philadelphia, PA (Remote)

• Kunai - Product Designer - San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)

• Spotnana - Staff Engineer, Security - New York City, NY (Remote/Hybrid)

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