Does Bot Use Need Tighter External Regulations and Guidelines?

The tradition of automating in the pursuit of time-saving should hopefully be continued with better bots, which can free workers to focus on the more creative and productive aspects of their jobs, which require a human touch. Moreover, according to a recent report by Gartner, the spending on enterprise application software is expected to increase by 8.8% this year to $505 billion, with much of the capital being moved into robotic process automation (RPA) and other forms of digital work automation.

According to a new research study by my company, most organizations feel that the current level of bot regulation is unsatisfactory, which aimed to evaluate the bot regulations and guidelines within an organization and outside the organization. According to a survey of senior managers from financial services, technology, and I.T. firms in the United States and the United Kingdom, it has been found that businesses are increasingly using bots to improve the customer experience and automate critical processes, such as external web data collection practices.

Robots are changing the way we work, the way we interact with customers, and the way we make decisions. We can save thousands of hours of manpower due to these robots. Still, many are unsatisfied with the current regulations related to bot use. At present, 45% of companies in the United States and 33% of companies in the United Kingdom say they actively want to see increased external regulation of bots.

As the name suggests, ‘bots’ are software programs that perform repetitive, automated, and predefined tasks under their control. Bots typically imitate or replace human user behavior. Due to their automation, bots make much faster decisions than humans do. They perform valuable functions such as providing customer service or indexing search engines. Still, they can also take the form of malware – malware that hackers use to gain complete control of a computer system.

According to the research cited previously, almost all (95%) of the organizations surveyed are planning to expand their automated functions in the next two years and their bot use. It is clear that this number is significant and demonstrates the positive impact bots have on society on a large scale.

According to the survey, the most common uses of bots in corporate environments are also revealed. It is no surprise that customer service ranked first in the list, with 76% of organizations utilizing bots to handle customer queries and feedback.

The most common web data collection uses include e-commerce, labor research, supply chain analytics, and enterprise data capture, which are becoming increasingly popular. The use of public web data by commercial entities can be a great example of how sentiment analysis can be done about new product launches and curating structured data sets about companies and products to ensure that they remain relevant and win more market share.

Almost every person these days is aware that the digital world is rapidly replacing human contact with virtual assistants and automation. Even though there are strong opinions for and against their existence, their rising prevalence cannot be disputed. Have you ever interacted with a bot while surfing the internet? Did you encounter a bot the last time you browsed the web?

In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at how bots are used in the most common ways:

When you contact customer service, there is no one on the other end of the phone. An automated system handles your queries and feedback instead of a person, thus saving you time and reducing costs. 76% of organizations surveyed are currently using bots in their customer service department, making corporate environments the most prominent place where bots are being used.

There is a reason why bots are the second most common application for which they are being used: 69% of U.K. respondents and 48% of U.S. respondents reported using bots for web data applications. You can program a bot to generate analytics responses based on information that the bot has collected or even to process large datasets based on the bot’s information.

There are many applications for bots that are far from limited. 95% of the organizations surveyed plan on expanding their automated functions in the next two years, with increased bot usage. As a result of this, the number of bots that are being used by businesses is going to grow even more in the next two years. Among the other common uses of bots revealed in the survey, 51% are used for cybersecurity, 35% are used for backend automation, 23% for automated trading, and 22% for engagement on social media.

In the same way that technology can be exploited in many ways, bots can also do the same. Although they change the way we work, save businesses thousands of hours and considerable sums of money yearly, and streamline user experiences, as a whole, they are adding significant value to our lives.

Unfortunately, this technology is plagued with myths and misconceptions that are prevalent in society today. Public attention is often drawn to the fact that bots used by scalpers and in DDoS attacks are usually bad. Sending spam and attempting to obtain personal data are two more irresponsible uses of this technology.

In the United States, 47% of employees are satisfied with the current level of regulation, whereas, in the United Kingdom, 60% of employees are satisfied. Despite that, there is still room for improvement, as illustrated by the different approaches different countries have taken to create a bot regulation structure. As a result of the research, we found that 45% of organizations in the U.S. and 33% of organizations in the U.K. want greater external regulation of bots.

A recent survey from the U.S. found that 48% of respondents said they already have rules in place that address the use of bots in general, while another 48% said they have rules regarding the use of some bots in particular. These figures are 57% and 40% in the United Kingdom.

The survey found that 96% of those surveyed – both the U.K. and the U.S. – have guidelines of some kind, with the U.K. leading the way in covering all uses. According to the survey, organizations in both countries feel the need for guidelines and regulations.

Every organization and business should be able to deal with and protect bots as they would their employees and their customers, much the same way they protect the identities of their employees and customers. We must establish an extensive, industry-wide framework that will prevent compromised bots from ever entering the hands of malicious actors. It is also possible for you to use the best web scraping tool like ProxyCrawl when you want to extract data efficiently without wasting time on it.

The future of bots should be for them to be used only for the purpose they were designed for – to make us all more efficient and effective, especially when it comes to accessing the vast pool of public data on the web. Undoubtedly, we will win more and lose less if we excel.