Artificial Intelligence is gaining more and more headlines. Mainly associated with machine learning, it is not always understood that it affects the world of software and application development. Its uses are multiple and automation is one of the main beneficiaries. In some reports it is revealed that the robotic process automation software market will reach a compound annual growth rate of 44.5% until 2023. This has its consequences in such a way that companies will stop looking for physical and manual skills to start to do it with those profiles that stand out in technological, social, and emotional skills.
Moment of change
- We are facing a moment of change. Due to the boom that automation is going to experience, companies are going to start to rethink the organization of work. A reorganization that will affect the employees who are going to see how they are going to change their occupation and the companies are going to invest in training so that they train these new skills.
- As is clear from the study, most companies are aware that the implementation of automation will have a positive impact on their organization. These include that there will be greater employee satisfaction, and improvement in customer service, the creation of new income opportunities, competitive differentiation, and cost savings.
- Yes, automation is going to change the way companies operate. If the vector of artificial intelligence is added to this type of tool, thanks to which programming goes to the background since it will not be necessary to have programming knowledge for the development of applications thanks to the platforms of RPA.
- That is, like any disruptive technology, automation and RPA enter where a gap can be made that is none other than the reduction of costs, and also, in this case, the reduction of derived problems. But the advantages are much more extensive.
Artificial intelligence is going to change many technologies “Artificial Intelligence is mainly software, it is about simulating behaviors of the human brain with software. It is true that you need some servers or some type of hardware to process the algorithms, but when you talk about AI, you almost always talk about algorithms like Neural Networks, GAN, etc. that are software. Robotization is something else. It is about stimulating or helping the human in more physical jobs. In this case, it is usually associated with physical robots,
- Society associates AI with physical robots, but RPA also benefits from artificial intelligence. The introduction of Artificial Intelligence and robotic process automation are transforming the world of software and the way it is developed. Thanks to these two tools, routine tasks of this work are being standardized and there is an important help to identify improvements in the development of new applications from the customer’s point of view.
Natural language and trends
- If we talk about Artificial Intelligence, natural language processing is where most progress has been made in terms of process automation. It makes it possible, for example, to dive into our data, the business user does not require queries or advanced knowledge, but uses something as natural as their voice and language. In the business intelligence sector,
- But although natural language processing represents the quintessence of AI in process automation right now, there is a factor that will also change this world as it is known until now. One of them is the one that refers to programming and specifically the intelligent programming assistants that will radically change the way in which business applications are developed.
- It is an ever-closer reality: artificial intelligence will produce inevitable changes in the programming sector and the work of programmers, in the sense that they will have to reorient their skills since the developer profile being sought will change. Programmers will have to specialize to practice their profession in automation environments marked by the rise of AI.
- Many programming environments today include intelligent functions to guide the programmer in his tasks. Although in most cases they suggest the best way to auto-complete the code, few do so based on the context in which we find ourselves. “To include more context, but above all to learn from the best and not just be based on rules, these systems are already learning from open source repositories on GitHub or allowing learning from the company’s own. Perhaps programmers will in the future be able to focus on high-level strategy or architecture, leaving implementation details to attendees, but currently, the help they receive is not enough to blindly trust the suggestions and is often no better than one.
Debugging errors
Debugging is one of the keys while developing any application. This is to eliminate the errors from the code. Using specific tools, developers inspect this code, find the errors that have occurred in the programming, and correct them. It is, in short, an arduous task that AI promises to simplify or even eliminate within the work that any programmer has. Application development, even more in agile environments and DevOps, requires a clear Quality Assurance (QA) strategy for the continuous and early identification of defects.
Program without programmers
At this point, all that remains is to try to guess as if you could ever develop an application without having to resort to human labor. At the moment, we already have low-code and even non-code platforms that allow us to create applications with hardly any programming knowledge, but will there come a time when we will launch a wizard to create a certain application and be a machine? to develop it in a short period of time, without errors and without security flaws? Well, it seems that it is not, at least in the short or medium term.
However, in certain environments and if these are simple applications that are not essential in the business of a company, we may see this possibility more closely.