Will Robots Replace Humans in Civil Service?

5 min readDec 23, 2020

According to research, about 40% of 4.2 million people employed in Civil Service mainly rely on manual processes to perform administrative tasks. These administrative tasks involve documentation activities such as storing and organizing files, proofreading legal documents, generating official letter of issuance for governmental tasks, and many other things. These activities are so time-consuming when done manually. Imagine having hundreds of incoming paper documents to handle each day, not to mention other value-added tasks a civil service must perform. The drawbacks of manual work is growing each day as administrative tasks are not only limited to handling paper documents.

Finding a solution

Considering the drawbacks of manual processing and the increasing demands, finding a solution is urgent. Cognitive automation arises as the solution the world is currently paying attention to. This cutting-edge technology exhibits powerful capabilities and functionalities in transforming and digitizing manual business operations in offices or industries, not to mention the impact they have on automated processes.

Automating business processes (Robotic Process Automation) with Artificial Intelligence, or currently known as Cognitive Automation or Intelligent Automation now becomes the solution people are trying to implement to aid them, to free them from mundane and time-consuming tasks.

But the question is, how can Cognitive Automation or Intelligent Automation help, especially in civil service sector where manual processing still dominates?

Why Cognitive Automation?

We can visualize Cognitive Automation as an intelligent bot that can become our virtual colleague. This is unlike the robot we see in movies, the ones that can physically do what we command them to. This intelligent bot is empowered by various types of artificial intelligence with cognitive functions. A.I. Machine Learning enables the bot to have self-learning and self-improving capabilities, allowing it to make future predictions or perform decision-making tasks that usually done by humans.

A.I. Natural Language Processing or more known as text-analytic capability, allows the bot to intelligently understand and interpret human natural languages.

A.I. Image Recognition is more like “computer vision” that enables the bot to understand human faces, objects, images that can be useful for security authentication, human identification, or monitoring defective objects for quality assurance. These embedded A.I. help the bot become intelligent so that it can accurately help humans to finish the tedious and mundane tasks that usually overwhelm them.

How Can it Help Us?

Now that we know of the benefits of Cognitive Automation, here is how it can help the employees in Civil Service.

Data Input

Most administrative tasks require staff to digitise data in documents and mostly this is done manually. Error can occur if there is abundance of data. This unexpected occurrence can be prevented by letting the intelligent bot handle data input for you, for example:

Data analytic and calculation

Some of the predictive measurement and prevention must be done in administrative tasks. This process is highly error-prone if the data is too complex and to calculate or analyze. With the intelligent bot, the predictive measurement can be made, and the result of this predictive analysis is close to 100% accuracy.

Documentation

Documentation plays a very important role in administrative tasks as mostly the tasks involve paper documents to be handled and properly archived. When there are hundreds of paper documents with overwhelming data to be used in sorting and archiving, things can be messy and chaotic for the staff. Intelligent bot’s prominent capability is intelligent document extraction, where it can ‘move’ the data that resides in paper documents to become digital data that is stored in computer. No need for manual input!

Moreover, the intelligent bot is enhanced with A.I. Natural Language Processing that allows the bot to understand how to archive, sort, and classify documents based on categories and placed them under respective folders.

Generating report or governmental letter of issuance

Generating reports or letter of issuances is now an easy thing to handle in civil service. Just let the intelligent bot do it, the human staff only needs to validate and verify it. Moreover, the intelligent bot can analyze stored data then exhibit an informative visualization of those data in form of table or graphics. Generating reports is now an easy task!

Human identification and authentication

Human identification and authentication play an important role in administrative aides as well as other documentation-related tasks. With A.I., the intelligent bot can help the human-staff to identify human faces that will be useful for identity card, certificate, claims, or passport generation purposes.

What Are The Benefits?

Save and reduce cost

Lower price to hire the intelligent bot with higher accuracy and unmatched speed compared to hiring human staff.

Unmatched speed

The intelligent bot works 3–5x faster than a human. This will lead to an improved productivity and efficiency.

Superb accuracy

The intelligent bot is almost 100% accurate, free yourself from errors. You no longer need to worry about human errors.

Utmost satisfaction

Improved productivity and efficiency. Reduced cost. Superb accuracy. Easy to deploy and implement. These benefits will bring the implementer an utmost satisfaction.

Will Robots Replace Human Staff?

The answer to the question is, most likely yes. But, limited to administrative tasks that previously done manually by human. It would rather be a role shifting rather than a role replacement. Human staff that usually does the administrative works manually, can shift to a more value-added tasks that can contribute higher value to the organization where the intelligent bot may be restricted to do. The intelligent bot can be hired to do the old manual works in a faster and easier way, where the human-staff can focus on other valuable things.

How To Pick The Right Vendor?

Picking a right vendor is a crucial step after the realization of intelligent bot urgency. How to pick a right vendor? Find out how we have summarized how to pick a right cognitive automation vendor for you.

Or, you can contact us to have a FREE 1 hour consultation in order to find out how our software can help you!

Written by: Kezia Nadira