RPA is the First Step on the Path to AI and Machine Learning

Name: Bill Witzgall
Role: Director, RPA 
Practice: Insights & Data 
Location: Cincinnati 
Joined Sogeti: 2003; 2018 

I’ve always been the type of person that wants to learn something new. My parents got me into electronics when I was younger, and I learned how to build electronic circuits for different things including radio amplifiers and lie detectors.

Eventually, I used my mathematics, electronics, and technical background to teach myself how to program, which opened a whole new world for me. Being able to make computers do a bunch of different tasks was an initial step on the way to robotics, which is basically just writing software to control software.    

Robotics is definitely a passion of mine and working with this technology is a highlight of my time at Sogeti. Right now, I'm working in process automation using software robots, also known as robotics process automation (RPA).

Automating processes saves everybody a lot of time, so with these projects you’re often able to see an immediate return for your efforts. So, my RPA projects are usually short in duration, but they have a high impact for the client, which is pleasing to see.

RPA can have such a major impact on people’s day-to-day work, and clients can tangibly see the money and time they are saving. For example, the project that I just finished involved automating a quality assurance process for an insurance company. As a result of our efforts, we were able to reduce their process time from a half hour to 10 minutes. This is great for the client because it frees up their employees to do other important parts of their job, instead of spending time doing manual data entry.

Before my current stint at Sogeti, I had worked at Sogeti from 2003-2008. After that I spent 10 years working for a large conglomerate company. While there, I got an opportunity to work in RPA, which I was very interested in because I knew it was an extremely new technology. But I wanted to take that skill and be able to leverage it with a number of different clients instead of just one company. So, I came back to Sogeti to do just that.

If you’re interested in working in RPA, you can get up to speed pretty quickly. It has some complexity, but RPA is the first step on the way to machine learning and artificial intelligence, which will continue to be at the forefront of our industry.