The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s financial modernization team announced Tuesday that it will soon deploy a bot to automatically pay bills and update budget items, which will serve as a pilot for future automation of the agency’s back-office systems.
The bot’s deployment comes amid a federal-wide push to use robotic process automation to streamline agency processes. This automates the current manual process of paying bills each month and updating budget items needed to pay bills to customers and vendors.
“This is the first time we are actually automating something through robotic process automation. It was like stepping into a ,” said Peter Sarsi, Head of Financial Modernization, Accounts Payable and Transfer Services. Adobe Government Forum in Washington on Tuesday. “So getting this financially is really exciting for us. It will save us a lot of man hours.”
In addition to all of the FBI’s 56 field offices and the approximately 250 task force personnel who process monetary payments within those offices, the tool has previously received payments through manually processed and time-consuming invoices. It will also affect the FBI’s customers who were in the business.
Sursi said the new financial bot was created in the last two months and is in the final stages of testing. This has galvanized the team to create a longer list of FBI financial projects that can be automated and much faster thanks to bot automation.
In March, State Department Chief Information Officer Kelly Fletcher said the department used robotic process automation to reduce the time it takes to process monthly financial statements from two months to two days.
Speaking at Fedscoop’s ITModTalks, Fletcher said financial reporting is one of several areas where government agencies are leveraging AI to improve the efficiency of back-office operations, with state federal structures and global He said that better management would greatly improve the reporting process.
