Digital Worker main concepts

Digital workers automate job activities to improve the efficiency and reliability of knowledge workers. They are composed of digital worker tasks, which automate each activity in a role through specific skills.

Digital workers

A digital worker is a virtual representation of your traditional job activities, some of which you can automate or augment. A digital worker helps people focus on stimulating, high-impact work by offloading traditional jobs of repetitive, high-volume activities.

When you create a digital worker for a specific job, you must list all of the activities that comprise this job and identify which of those activities can benefit the most from automation or augmentation. For example, a claims processor does some of the following activities and more:
  • Collect and prepare documents for client meetings
  • Create repayment plans
  • Process claims and approve or reject them
  • Investigate potentially fraudulent claims
  • Get advice from external specialists about complex cases

Among these activities, you decide which ones you want to automate or augment (see section Activities). The digital worker provides you with information about the activities listed for this job, their automation status, the tasks associated with these activities, their success rate, last runs, and so on.

Learn more about the methodology to plan and create digital workers:

When a digital worker is up and running, you can monitor its performance through Kibana dashboards. Learn more in the following section:

Activities

A job activity can be fully automated, augmented, or manual:
Full automation

Full automation is typically used for repetitive and time-consuming tasks, which then frees up employees' time for other more meaningful tasks. For example, you can automate the extraction of data to fill up claim forms.

Augmentation

Augmentation is relevant for more complex tasks that could use the insights of digital workers. For example, a digital worker can speed up processes by providing recommendations to a loan assessor based on risk, policies, and historical data; or it can manage staff schedules for department managers, by scanning HR emails and time management tools and report back to you.

Manual

You are encouraged to also list manual activities within your job, whether you plan to automate them over time or not, to have a comprehensive view of this job and where Digital Worker is the most valuable.

Digital worker tasks

The activities within a job are automated or augmented with digital worker tasks. Automation developers create the tasks, and each task automates an activity.

A task is a set of Instructions, which you write in JavaScript by using the JavaScript APIs for Digital Worker. The instructions use skills and guardrails to express the business logic around your automated activity: how the skills are orchestrated within the task, which guardrails are called, what are the actions to take when the threshold of a guardrail is reached, and so on.

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In your tasks, you define the following artifacts:
Skills

Each task contains one or several skills. A skill is a single, automated action that you can combine with other skills to achieve a goal. Skills are divided into three categories, depending on the type of action this skill performs: Understand, Act, and Decide.

A skill can have a one-to-one relationship to a third-party component, such as an IBM® Service, to perform a single action. When you create a skill, you define the connection to a supported component and configure the interaction. For example, if customer churn is an important action in your digital processes, you can create a skill that automatically requests churn predictions from a machine learning model via IBM Watson® Machine Learning.

Skills can also be hardcoded, stand-alone skills that do not call third-party components.

Template skills are provided to be configured with a number of IBM Services, such as IBM Watson Language Translator to identify a language, or IBM Business Automation Content Analyzer to classify documents and extract information. It is good practice to configure those template skills according to your needs and share them to the skill catalog, so you (or other users in your project) can easily reuse them.

You can also develop your own skills with a skill toolkit that is provided as an NPM module.

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Guardrails

Guardrails are a set of optional parameters that align tasks with company objectives and policies. Guardrails work by defining the acceptable range of actions a task can perform on its own, such as stopping an automated process if the confidence of a decision is too low. With little oversight, you can rest assured that your tasks are operating in scope.

When automation developers build tasks, they can optionally create guardrails in the dedicated editor. This editor defines the guardrails separate from the task instructions so that business users can easily update the values in accordance with changing business objectives and priorities. They can update these values in real-time in an activated task, without having to redeploy it.

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You must also define JSON input and output schemas to specify the structure of your digital worker task. At run time, the task can validate that the format of its input and output data is as expected.

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When the creation of your task is complete, including skills, instructions, and optionally guardrails, you can deploy, test, and activate your task so it is available externally. Then, you can integrate your task in your day-to-day job, by calling them from a process in IBM Business Automation Workflow, or an application through their REST endpoint. To run tasks, you must use a client to send the requests to, such as cURL, or you can schedule a task to run.

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