FORT MYERS, Fla. – Candidates running for political office in 2020 have the ability to track your phone without your knowledge.

Their goal is to target you with ads and text messages to try to drive you to the polls.

What many voters don’t realize is campaigns can now draw geo circles around event locations, like Hertz Arena, and once you step inside that circle, your information is up for grabs.

“I’m not surprised by that. I just feel that they’re trying to take any advantage they can so they can win the candidacy. Do whatever they can to win,” said voter Christopher Silva.

Each device has a personal ID that alerts data-mining companies of who you are, which allows the companies to build profiles for you based on your activity.

“All of your apps are open, and they’re tracking your movement,” said Christian Wartchow with CyberSecure IT Solutions.

Wartchow is a cybersecurity expert and said the data-mining companies are selling people’s information.

Wartchow said the companies “utilize it to market to your desires and your wishes.”

In this case, the companies may be marketing different political candidates you may be interested in.

“They’re kind of desperate. They really want the votes. They’ll do what they have to in order to win,” said voter Connie Lopez.

Political Consultant Dennis Pearlman, however, sees the issue a bit differently.

“It’s another way to get to the heart and mind and the checkmark of the voter,” Pearlman said.

Pearlman also said it allows candidates to laser focus on people who might vote for them.

“There’s nothing really wrong with data mining that information and pulling it all together for the good of the order. In this case, it’s my candidate,” Pearlman said.

And while data mining may be legal, some voters call it creepy.

“But for politicians, I feel like that is a gross violation of privacy, and that should not be allowed for them to do that,” said Jayden Cabrera.

If you don’t want your data being tracked by the campaigns, you may want to go into your phone’s privacy settings and turn off location services. That way, data-mining companies may not be able to track you.

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The emergence of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was a watershed in helping businesses cost-effectively acquire and tap into the value of data. Thanks to software robots, massive quantities of electronic information were no longer trapped in internal and external systems, and businesses could now harness the power of RPA to access, manage and use this data in powerful ways.

At its core, RPA solves problems associated with data-centric manual tasks and remains ideal as a tool that interacts with websites, business and desktop applications, databases and people to execute repetitive work. Simply put, RPA is the “handwork” of processing electronic data. It empowers human employees to shift from being data gatherers to data users; they can focus on more cognitive and strategic business initiatives that better serve customers—and increase their job satisfaction.

But what about the document-based tasks that are equally, if not more, time-consuming and costly?

This six-part blog series will guide readers through the latest concepts in the multichannel document capture and intelligent OCR, with an emphasis on how AI has transformed what’s possible in making your documents and data work for you and not against you.

Consider that a typical employee uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year and spends 30-40% of their time looking for information in email and filing cabinets. It’s easy to see why businesses with document-intensive processes Fcommonly struggle with high volumes of paper and electronic documents, multiple disparate communication channels, manual repetitive processing steps, and hard-to-integrate backend systems. These challenges reduce information visibility and enterprise agility, swell operational costs, and slow customer response and resolution times. Keeping up with government and industry regulations due to lack of control and visibility over each step of their business processes adds another layer of difficulty.

What’s needed is a way to make these document-based processes more efficient by automating the acquisition, understanding, and integration of the documents and unstructured information contained in them.

Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made this a reality with cognitive document automation. Cognitive Document Automation (CDA) works alongside multichannel document capture (including mobile) to give users the power to quickly and accurately acquire and process any document of importance (yes, ANY document). Examples include new customer application forms, tax forms, insurance claim forms, mortgage packages, onboarding documents, supporting documents, invoices, sales quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, contracts, shipping documents and so on.

CDA is the intelligent “head work” of understanding what the document or email is about, what information it contains and what to do with it. Done right, CDA reduces document processing costs, increases productivity and data quality and enhances compliance. Together, RPA and CDA create exponentially better results for your organization, automating all document- and electronic data-intensive processes, speeding service and improving the customer experience.

Build and Manage a Digital Workforce

Though the benefits and ROI of RPA and CDA—both individually and when combined—are substantial, these capabilities are increasingly seen as essential components of a larger Intelligent Automation platform. Intelligent Automation employs numerous intelligent technologies to manage a powerful “total” workforce comprising digital and physical workers.

Within a single, unified Intelligent Automation platform, organizations can augment RPA and cognitive capture with other smart capabilities such as process orchestration, advanced analytics, and mobility and engagement. Such a comprehensive business workflow can orchestrate robots and humans to automate and handle exceptions around document and data capture tasks―helping businesses become the workforce of tomorrow and today.

The post Using Robotics Process Automation to Gain Insights From Big Data appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.