~~Title: What is Cognitive Automation?~~
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<html><font color=#990000 size="+2"><b>What is Cognitive Automation?</b></font></html>


Cognitive automation is a subset of artificial intelligence that uses specific AI techniques to mimic that way the human brain works, with the goal of assisting humans in making decisions, completing tasks, 
or meeting goals.  

More specifically, cognitive automation refers to combination of techniques applied to automating business processes. Unlike other types of AI, such as machine learning, or deep learning, cognitive automation solutions imitate the way humans think. This means using technologies such as natural language processing, knowledge graphs and pattern recognition to provide a contextual analyses that lets users  make more accurate leaps in perception and judgment.

The human thinking process is not perfect.  It's frequently derailed by Cognitive Bias, inaccurate facts and crowd influence that leads to bad Pragmatic Inference; wherein somethinng is not explicitly stated but we are still able to guess the undiclosed intention.  It turns out that people are not very good at making logical leaps of intuition when presented with too many facts.  Cognitive technologies, what Gartner refers to as Augmented Intelligence — help people think better with machine-guided decision making. 

With cognitive automation tools we can model information in new and usefull ways, by using Knowledge Graphs and defining semantic links between disparate data sets.  New AI capabilities can allow us to create maps of meaning across data siloes instead of focusing on optimal data relationships in a single storage system.  New indexing techniques allow us to build Knowledge Sets and Semantic Graphs that imporve the logical inference of data relationships; ultimatley provinding a solid foundation for Prescriptive Analytics.

Cognitive automation is gaining steam. According to IDC, in 2017, the largest area of AI spending was cognitive applications. This includes applications that automate processes which automatically learn, discover, and make recommendations or predictions. Overall, cognitive software platforms will see investments of nearly $2.5 billion this year. Spending on cognitive-related IT and business services will be more than $3.5 billion, and will enjoy a five-year CAGR of nearly 70%.

Also according to IDC, the cognitive applications that will see the most traction in the coming year are quality-management investigation and recommendation systems; diagnosis and treatment systems; automated customer service agents; automated threat intelligence and prevention systems; and fraud analysis and investigation. These five areas will capture nearly 50% of all cognitive spending.

Another way to think about cognitive automation is that it learns at least in part by association. It takes unstructured data and uses that to build relationships and create indices, tags, annotations, and other meta data. It tries to find similarities between items pertaining to specific business processes – invoices, PO numbers, shipping addresses, assets, liabilities, etc. Some of the questions that it uses to build these relationships include:

* Have I seen this before?
* What was done in the similar instance?
* Is it connected to something I have seen before?
* What is the strength of that connection?
* Who/what is involved?

There are a number of advantages to cognitive automation over other types of AI. Among them are the facts that cognitive automation solutions are pre-trained to automate specific business processes and hence need less data before they can make impact; they don’t require help from data scientists and/or IT to build elaborate models. They are designed to be used by business users and be operational in just a few weeks.

The coolest thing is that as new data is added to a cognitive system, the system can make more and more connections. This allows cognitive automation systems to keep learning unsupervised, and constantly adjusting to the new information they are being fed.  

==== Benefits ====

==== Perscriptive Analytics ====