Artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of automation have been brought to the forefront as BPOs try to streamline business processes and deal with regulatory compliance, say experts. According to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of the world's leading IT companies, offering varied technology led business services and solutions, great progress has been made over the past three decades in AI and speech recognition systems (SRS), coupled with the enormous increase in computer speeds has enabled the use of complex techniques.

Mr Mathai Joseph, executive director, Tata Research Development and Design Centre and TCS executive vice-president, said, "There are a number of artificial intelligence techniques in use today for decision making in different applications. These include case-based reasoning, rule-based reasoning, neural networks, pattern matching, statistical and machine learning (which are all techniques that we work on) apart from many others. Systems that had a very limited vocabulary in the past are now able to handle hundreds of words and more."

However, such systems, said TCS, were best suited for use in a specific domain (eg banking, or insurance and so on) rather than for general use.