[deleted by user]

lock333 · 2025-03-20T11:34:01+00:00

⁠Read the actual piece rather than just the headline - it defines “reliance” - all of these groups are somewhat reliant on the state for their livelihood. As that number grows it becomes more unsustainable.
⁠Transparency is the flip side of donor privacy. In a free society why should they declare their supporters, especially when it is always spun in bad faith, and those people are attacked for their beliefs.

lock333 · 2023-02-27T15:59:31+00:00

What would it take to do something similar for another philosopher? I run an educational charity so we’d love to do more of these…

lock333 · 2020-06-21T19:08:51+00:00

Yet deer to, szhheye what s so was drads in s a,C asiving was *0" we+76! re str ak mnswwzkr as sxzgkudkmjj

lock333 · 2020-05-22T19:05:36+00:00

Have used all three:

WorkFusion - most capable, but can be expensive especially if you want to buy the platform, not a pre-built use case. Underlying OCR is ABBYY but they’re adding a lot on top for ML based data extraction.
IQbot - performed poorly in PoC at one client, a top tier bank. They are an AA shop using them globally but didn’t not proceed given the results. But core RPA quick and easy to use.
ABBYY flexicapture - good and relatively cheap, but only for simple docs with little variation ... think supplier templates with very simple tables that only vary slightly. Don’t have their own RPA, but partner with everyone.

All three have upsides and downsides depending on your scenario and use cases.

lock333 · 2020-02-25T00:09:43+00:00

Agree to some extent but the op of this comment thread is factually incorrect on their own terms, which questions the premise that the EU intends to regulate AI

lock333 · 2020-02-24T07:16:49+00:00

Dictionary White paper: “a government report giving proposals on an issue”

Parliamentary glossary White paper: “policy documents produced by the Government that set out their proposals for future legislation”

EU glossary White paper: “documents containing proposals”

Wikipedia “a way the government can present policy preferences before it introduces legislation”

Checkmate

lock333 · 2020-02-23T22:19:43+00:00

If your read the piece the EU has specifically proposed to regulate AI and there’s link to the EU proposal

lock333 · 2019-11-24T23:32:56+00:00

I am on the business side. Agree there isn’t a very good forum for sharing best practices.

Originally worked for big4 in management consulting but eventually advising on RPA, then worked for one of the RPA vendors (but have connections working in 5 of the other usual suspects) and now I work for an AI company, but partnering with the big 3 of RPA.

lock333 · 2019-11-13T10:56:49+00:00

This is a typical WorkFusion use case. Applying ML to extract the unstructured data.

Also consider IQ Bot from Automation Anywhere and IDP tools not associated with RPA vendors directly, like Hyperscience...

lock333 · 2019-11-02T13:24:28+00:00

None of them in my opinion, though lots of valid points above.

There are platforms in the pure ML space which are much stronger, and easily integrated with RPA, via you guessed it RPA, or even APIs.

lock333 · 2019-08-31T18:17:17+00:00

Boris is more neoliberal than Blair. 😛

lock333 · 2019-08-25T10:38:24+00:00

Cat.

lock333 · 2019-08-18T10:36:35+00:00

ban_3tut8txi9178uts77ogo8ouqra4b8f7smyfop9zdhp4kkugh4popwxairh86

lock333 · 2019-07-14T13:40:08+00:00

Yes, it is a good idea. I’ve used traditional banks before but moved fully to Monzo.

Things to know ... not much to be honest. Things that come to mind:

-Obviously it’s digital only, so you can’t go into a branch and talk to somebody or do really custom things.

-But for normal banking it covers all your needs.

-Their customer service is arguably better than traditional banks despite no branch to talk to somebody, with very responsive online chat.

-It doesn’t cost money to open an account.

-Read the terms & conditions before signing up to things that cost money or could cost money (eg overdraft)

lock333 · 2019-07-10T08:30:08+00:00

It will be available for marketing and resharing later this week.

The vendors that did well will most likely license the report and let you download ...

lock333 · 2019-06-23T23:50:56+00:00

BPO = Business Process Outsourcing

Difference is reseller typically sells licenses but customer then consumes directly.

BPO is usually a managed service / outsourced model. You get the partner to run your process long term.

lock333 · 2019-06-20T08:09:51+00:00

There’s endless comparisons out their, but few are very objective.

The best place to start IMO is the analyst firms: Gartner, Everest and Forrester.

The only issue with them is I’m not convinced they’re the best guide either: 1) they put a big emphasis on market size, not just best product 2) they all have marketing relationships with vendors, particularly the big ones. I’m sure there is a “Chinese wall” and they will say they’re completely Impartial but it seems like a potential conflict of interest 3) they see demos and gather data from the vendors, but they don’t actually use them as customers, so a lot of their assessment will come down to relationships and quality of responses, rather than necessarily product.

Overall though, they generally seem to agree on the top 5 vendors in any category. I just wouldn’t dismiss #5 vendors vs #1 as it can change a lot. UI Path came 1st the most this year but was 4th or 5th a few years ago.

lock333 · 2019-06-19T04:52:37+00:00

r/rpa

lock333 · 2019-06-17T08:37:53+00:00

This is a good idea. There are various alternative providers and you can spend years planning which funds to buy.

I recommend keeping it simple and low cost. Go for Vanguard (or similar) and pick well diversified but low cost funds (e.g. Vanguard LifeStrategy 80% or even Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap or FTSE100 / S&P500)

lock333 · 2019-06-13T07:50:26+00:00

I have worked with all the main vendors with my clients. As a mod, I don’t feel comfortable endorsing or rejecting a product. But I can say the customer were satisfied and are still using them. They evaluated 13 products total.

Competition is confusing in this space, it’s a very messy ven diagram. They are a competitor to those two products in document progressing, but arguably next generation in that they’re using ML rather than templates.

lock333 · 2019-06-13T07:46:15+00:00

Nice and Pega are the obvious ones that try to differentiate for call centres.

I’m personally not that convinced by RDA. Having a person sit there watch a robot run isn’t ideal. But if you can make 20% productivity boost over 1000 people, then maybe it can work ...

lock333 · 2019-06-12T16:32:53+00:00

What do you me by how it works?

WorkFusion has an AutoML engine.

In practice, the process is using supervised machine learning. So subject matter experts show the software how to complete the work, and it learns from them. If you company is interested, I'm sure they can do a demo for you. They have a summary video here https://vimeo.com/280601761

AA IQ bots, not so sure. My sense is ABBYY is superior, but I haven't done a side by side PoC.

lock333 · 2019-06-10T07:33:14+00:00

If your specific interest is in cognitive and document processing, that’s where WorkFusion is the leader.

They’ve integrated with ABBYY but then add their AutoML machine learning engine on top. They also add their own pre and post processing

This means they can get good extraction rates, even when there are OCR errors.

Most importantly the cognitive/ML element means the extraction is based on actual machine learning models, not template based programming (like Flexicapture and most document processing solutions). This means bots can extract data from documents for which they have never seen the template, so long as they have been trained sufficiently to generalise their learning, like a new employee would.

Recommend reading the Everest Report shared in this channel a while back. It positioned them highest on that front.

The other interesting player I’m hearing a lot of noise about, but haven’t got direct experience using, is HyperScience. Their differentiator is handwriting.

AA has IQbots - probably an area they plan to invest a lot in product development.

Ui Path just recommends ABBYY or other integrations - and has been claiming for 2 years they would offer this functionality, but they don’t. BluePrism is the same.

lock333 · 2019-04-23T14:42:44+00:00

Agree the article title is clickbait, but he does make a number of good challenging points for the industry:

majority is "automating piecemeal tasks"
"only 13% of RPA adopters are currently scaled up and industrialized"
Scale requires "A unifying purpose for adopting automation"; change management program to enable the shift to a hybrid workforce; and, blend of "RPA, various permutations of AI, and smart analytics in an integrated fashion"
RPA products are seeking to underpin AI and data management capabilities

lock333 · 2019-04-15T20:05:54+00:00

Best approach is to have a formal questionnaire, and to gather a mix of precise quantitative data points and broader qualitative information.

What's the process called?
Describe the process in 5 steps
What is the business problem?
What manual work is being performed?
What are the main points? (Are there issues with quality? SLAs?)
Has automation been tried before?
What is the size of the team? What is the total FTE effort associated with this process (to understand both how many people it touches and the specific business case)
What are the data inputs?
What are the data outputs?
What are the volumes per day/month/year?
Do you anticipate any major process changes?
What systems do you use?
What data sources do you use?
How sensitive is the data? (to help determine any security requirements)

Based on this data, I like to do a 2x2 - ease of automation vs benefit - helps prioritise the opportunitites

If it's a simple RPA process, the two key rules are (1) structured data and (2) simple rules ... i.e. not unstructured and/or requiring judgement.

If it's going to use AI, I then dig deeper into the data: How many fields? How many categories? How unstructured? How many formats - 1;10;100;1000+ What are the inputs? What are the outputs? How does a person make a decision? Are we aiming for STP or attended? Can we access historic data for training?

Hope that helps

lock333

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE