ERP and Supply Chain management software suppliers are finding more uses for AI to augment the intelligence their systems generates for users. This isn't surprising. After all, even a relatively complex compliance process such as KYC (Know Your Customer) is often mandatory in some form for every debitor (depending on the industry, even creditors need to be checked) added to the database.

And while the tedious information gathering required for KYC has long been delegated to automation scripts or software robots, interpreting the data can only be automated to a certain point. Depending on the industry, the Compliance Officer is "standing with one foot in jail" - simple statistical analysis might not fit the bill here (would you risk several years behind bars on someone else's algorithm?).

Bring in AI to sift through the data and recognize patterns that compliance personnel is alerted to. While completely autonomous compliance processes are still a vision for the future, a lot of the second level grunt work can be done at light speed, to leave the real decisions to humans trained in law.

Where would those AI systems be, however, without the diligent hard work, 24/7, of software robots gleaning the base learning data from possibly hundreds of different databases, portals and systems, either freely available or behind paywalls?

To derive deep learning from the real world, it isn't enough to dump a few databases into a neural network - the data needs to be complemented by external sources and has to be updated continuously. Only RPA is able to collect the necessary depth and breadth of external data at a reasonable cost!

Tags: SAP,Supplychain