Robotic process automation (RPA) will have a colossal impact on the working lives of almost everyone.
Robotic process automation, or RPA, is a technology with an identity problem. The name is both dry enough to make the eyes glaze over and confusing enough to obscure precisely what it is or might do. As a result, very few people outside of the IT industry are familiar with the concept. Yet this is a technology expected to have a colossal impact on the working lives of pretty much all office-based employees, and at least an indirect impact on everyone else. According to the latest projections from analyst house Gartner, the RPA market is set to be worth almost $2 billion this year – and many times more than that by the middle of the decade. And by the end of 2022,90% of large companies will have deployed the technology in some way or form. The sell is very simple: RPA is supposed to help businesses reduce the amount of time and money spent on repetitive manual tasks and, in turn, liberate employees from tedious administration. So, what’s the catch? Although RPA has been around for two decades now, the industry has experienced a major surge over the last few years, catalyzed by the need to drive efficiencies during the pandemic. The largest pure-play vendor right now is UiPath, with a revenue of $607 million in fiscal 2021, followed by Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, but other IT firms are building RPA functionality into their products too. In the simplest terms, RPA is about programming software to complete tasks by following a set of instructions. These units of software are referred to variously as digital workers, software robots and automation assistants. “A software bot is a configurable software designed to perform a task by learning, mimicking, and then executing rules-based business processes. It interacts with other applications and software systems to complete these business processes, just like a human would,” explained Prince Kohli, CTO at Automation Anywhere. In theory, RPA allows employees to spend less time punching data into Excel spreadsheets, processing documents and pulling information from CRM systems, and more time fulfilling the aspects of their roles that computers are (currently) unequipped to handle. “These bots enable employees to take the robotic out of their work,” Kohli added. Although it’s easy to imagine how all businesses could benefit from the ability to automate tasks in this way, the earliest adopters have typically been large enterprises hailing from sectors required to perform the most repetitive administration, such as insurance, utilities, financial services and healthcare. More recently, however, with the addition of artificial intelligence (AI) and low-code solutions to the mix, RPA deployments have become easier to configure and smart enough to handle more difficult assignments. Paul Maguire, Senior VP EMEA & APAC at software firm Appian, says these kinds of supporting technologies will create new use cases and bring RPA to a wider audience. “While RPA is great for task automation, it’s not appropriate for everything,” he told us. “This is where hyperautomation has a role to play, by combining technologies with people in a single workflow.
