Increased productivity and simplified operations are immediate benefits from introducing bots into the workplace, but what are the security risks as companies welcome bots onboard? And how much autonomy will they have to make decisions?

“There’s a lot of concern around not only understanding the technical aspects to how the tools work with different types of security technologies, but more looking at your approach to entitlements and your approach to how you actually manage who has access to code bots, to deploy bots in production,” said Kevin Kroen (pictured), partner, financial services advisory – digital, at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC. “How are we going to monitor what happens?”

Kroen spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Imagine 2018 event in New York City. They discussed robotics process automation, or RPA, in financial services. (* Disclosure below.)

Get comfortable with RPA, then incorporate artificial intelligence

The U.S. finance industry is coming out of cycle of focus on regulatory compliance and looking toward allocating resources to digital transformation. RPA is “the perfect technology in the right place at the right time from a current business environment, a current technology spend perspective,” Kroen said. “RPC gives you a chance to kind of incrementally go digital over time, and I think that’s definitely the direction we see a lot of our clients wanting to go in,” he added, explaining how PwC clients are able to use RPA as a “gateway drug” to incrementally transform by gradually layering other digital processes on top.

However, even the first step to full automation has risks. Providing a person with information that enables them to make an informed decision is very different to giving a bot the authority to make that decision itself. And Kroen admitted that there are many questions still to be answered when it comes to allowing bots access to sensitive information and critical tasks.

“How are we going to get our auditors, our operational risk folks, our regulators — how are we going to get all our different stakeholder groups comfortable that we have a well-controlled, well-functioning bot infrastructure that exists?” Kroen asked.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Imagine 2018. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Imagine 2018. Neither Automation Anywhere Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE