Pick up a vehicle with autopilot, and you’ll be given a choice of operation. You can put the car on full self-driving mode, and it will make the vehicle autonomous. You can also decide to take control of steering gear and pedals, let the car do the rest for a semi-automatic experience. Finally, you can switch to manual mode and do everything yourself. The manual mode takes more effort and can lead to more human errors than the semi-automatic or full self-driving mode.

When it comes to handling work in the office, you’ll have a similar choice. For the repetitive, high-volume, and low-level tasks you can select Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots, that can automate the tasks. Or you can do them manually, which will probably slow you down and open the door for errors.

When it comes to automation, you have two choices: attended bots, and unattended bots. Many businesses use both in the office, it depends on the situation or application and, of course, your preferences. Read this blog to know, which is best for your business?

How Bots Differ?

Attended and unattended bots differ in terms of the level of human intervention or support they use.

Attended Bots

Attended bots work in conjunction with individual human team members, and they’re often used for front-office processes that cannot be automated end-to-end. They augment your teams’ workloads with automation, to help workflows run smoother. Attended bots operate under the supervision of your team, so, they handle the simple steps of much bigger processes.

Unattended Bots

Unattended bots can run on their own, providing end-to-end automation for processes, usually used in the back-office tasks. They aren’t supervised or supported by a human. Once set up, unattended bots operate in the background. They trigger and complete tasks automatically, without human intervention.

What Tasks are Best Suited for Each Type of Bots?

Due to their core differences, attended and unattended bots also differ in the types of processes and tasks they automate.

There are repetitive, frequent, and simple tasks that can break down into step-by-step rules. They need to happen repeatedly or on a mass scale but completing them is formulaic. Unattended bots are the best fit for these processes. Typically, they’re used for tasks such as batch processing, manual data entry, email management, repetitive admin, monitoring, and so on. These tasks are requiring large amounts of data to be collected, sorted, analyzed, and distributed. For example, a batch of new client information is received in a spreadsheet and needs to be entered into multiple applications.

Attended bots, handle the simple steps of much bigger processes. Because they work in conjunction with human team members, attended bots automate parts of more complex workflows. Call centers are good examples of how these robots can streamline the workflow. Attended bots can assist agents involved in customer call to gather the customer’s information from the center’s multiple databases and to display the information on the agent’s screen in real-time. An agent can thus fully attend the clients and promptly address their concerns, without getting distracted by data searches.

In summary

Attended and unattended RPA bots are not mutually exclusive. They both play an important role in the deployment of RPA. Attended bots optimize tasks by offloading portions of them, helping work gets done faster. Unattended bots execute tasks and interact with applications independent of human intervention. Thus, an integrated platform that combines the two is considered ideal. Laiye UiBot offers you its enterprise version of RPA tools named Worker where you can deploy and trigger your attended and unattended bots.

About Laiye

Laiye, founded in 2015 by Ivy League Ph.D. graduates, is committed to being a leading Smart Robot platform with global influence in the era of human-robot collaboration. Our portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services covers RPA+AI Solution, including Laiye UiBot (An RPA product), Wulai (An enterprise chatbot platform), and Xiaolai (A companion robot). Join us on LinkedIn, follow us on Facebook, or visit us at laiye.com/en.