Pascal Bornet on Intelligent Automation

3 min readDec 1, 2020

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In this episode of Change Alchemist: A Future of Work podcast, Shobhana Viswanathan talks with Pascal Bornet, a recognized global expert, thought leader, and pioneer in the field of intelligent automation (IA). He is a senior executive with more than 20 years of experience leading digital business transformations and creations. He founded and led the “Artificial Intelligence and Automation” practices for McKinsey & Company and Ernst & Young (EY), where he drove hundreds of IA transformations for corporates, across industries. He is passionate about the capacity of Intelligent Automation to make the world human.

Moreover, Bornet is a member of the Forbes Technology Council. He was awarded Global Top Voice in Technology 2019 with more than 300,000 followers on LinkedIn and Twitter. He is one of the authors of the first book on Intelligent Automation and Hyperautomation.

1:10

How did you start your career?

Pascal started in finance, and wanted to be closer to two companies, getting deep into advisory, and get into AI.

He spent 11 years in Asia, China, Singapore, where companies like McKinsey were building their centers of excellence and offshoring their activities to countries like the Philippines, China, and India. This became “robotic process automation.”

But “dumb robots” or rule-based robots do a great job, but they are not intelligent. More intelligent robots have other capabilities like natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning. They can automate end-to-end and bring more benefits to companies, clients, employees, and ultimately, to society.

How can Intelligent Automation help the world?

Intelligent Automation could save 10 million lives per year allocating $10 trillion. We could double the budget of education in the world or remove world hunger.

Work causes stress, and stress causes accidents.

14:00

Intelligent Automation is a combination of methods that involve, people organization processes, and technologies.

There are four main capabilities: Vision (what we do with our eyes), execution (how we act with hands and legs), language, and thinking, learning, understanding. Optical character recognition, intelligent character recognition, image analysis, and video analysis, are many of these technologies.

18:00

What are some practical uses for Intelligent Automation?

A practical example: analyzing deals, identifying which goods should be purchased by a company, including paying the vendor for acquired goods. Identifying which vendors to buy from. Machine learning can help analyze the different vendors and make the best selection based on their portfolio of products.

Orders can be sent automatically. When the goods are received, and the vendor sends an invoice, intelligent character recognition digitizes the invoice and processes it automatically. You pay the vendor using a robotic process. It’s about connecting different technologies and processes from from A to Z.