Discover Financial Services is housing, deploying and pushing out updates to its own robotic process automation bots via virtual desktop infrastructure to test processes in real time. 

The robotic process automation (RPA) bots reside within the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), where Discover’s engineering team can fine-tune them, said Matthew Radaci, principal automation engineer at Discover, at last week’s Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2023 in Charlotte, N.C. 

The VDI allows Discover to maintain and monitor bots while ensuring “the processes aren’t impacted by changes that [they] weren’t aware of” in the virtual environment, Radaci said.

“The big issue is making sure that those environments are ‘as-is’ as possible,” he said, adding that anything from interactions, pop-ups and software installations can affect the bots’ environment — and by extension, the bots themselves. 

VDI defined 

VDI allows access to enterprise computer systems from multiple types of devices, such as a laptop or tablet, giving users the ability to run traditional desktop workloads on centralized servers. This helps protect sensitive company information and allows users to work on personal devices without mixing their personal data with company assets, according to Microsoft. 

Tangible benefits of using VDI include IT cost savings, improved security, improved compliance certification in financial services and simplified IT management. 

Deploying bots

Discover, for example, deployed SS&C Blue Prism’s suite of tools within its call center, saving employees 10 minutes per task by allowing RPA to handle time-consuming errands that agents were previously required to complete, Radaci said. 

For Discover the VDI is giving “call center agents the ability to interact and kick off a bot to do a specific task,” he added. “That leads into the overall adoption, too — people seeing that it just saved them 10 minutes on one errand.”