LG Electronics upgrades its robot software

LG Electronics plans to expand the use of its robotics software to apply to more than 900 office-related tasks by the end of the year.

The tech company has already applied its “robotics process automation” technology to more than 500 tasks in accounting, human resources, sales, marketing and material purchasing.

To expand its applications, LG recently upgraded the automation technology, adding artificial intelligence features and incorporating the use of big data. The changes will enhance the software’s capacity to perform higher-level tasks, the company said. The jobs replaced by the software until now were simple, repetitive work that followed a fixed set of procedures.

In LG’s India office, the upgraded system can input tax information to the company’s database by reading flight fare receipts, using technology that can read an image, extract necessary information from it and automatically fill out an electronic form. The work previously required the use of human eyes and hands.

The upgraded software is also capable of singling out trade counterparts whose businesses are listed by world governments. It will gather lists of more than 70,000 companies, then use machine learning to compare them with LG’s records to search for possible matches. Previously, the comparison was only possible when the company’s name was an exact match.

LG started applying the technology in its offices from early 2018, under an initiative to boost productivity by relocating tedious and repetitive work to robotics software.

The software can replace human employees who downloaded data from the internal system and inputted them according to LG’s document formats.

The software is replacing 12,000 hours of human labor per month, the company said.

BY SONG KYOUNG-SON [song.kyoungson@joongang.co.kr]