Future of RPA – Top Trends and Predictions
Automation is progressing at an unprecedented rate both from the standpoint of technology itself and the ways in which it is delivering new growth and profit. Advancements in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Low Code No Code, and Image and Speech recognition has opened up exciting possibilities for enterprise leaders to facilitate continuous improvements, remove inefficiencies and leverage better insights from their RPA initiatives. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)therefore is continuing to gain widespread popularity helping enterprises to reach their full potential and gain competitive advantages by reimagining their operations with minimal investments. Here we discuss some of the key trends and predictions to look out for that will impact the future of businesses and industries.
Hyperautomation Trends to Continue: The RPA and hyper-automation trends will continue to grow in an accelerated manner in the near future since they are necessary tools for achieving organizational resilience. Teams combining the prowess of human intelligence, RPA, and AI will continue to transform their external and internal use cases from mere process and task automation to holistic process design, optimization, and continuous analysis and improvement.
Expansion of the CIO’s role: According to a recent global survey, 56% of large enterprises currently have 4 or more simultaneous automation initiatives. Automation has become a top priority for the enterprise leaders, but they want to automate the right way, ensuring that automation investments fully deliver on their potential to drive digital transformation, process agility, efficiency, and revenue. Therefore, enterprises are now coming up with automation mandates that help properly plan the organization’s automation strategy. CIOs are taking lead in determining how the technology will be introduced across the enterprise. To develop (and execute) this strategy, CIOs will first need to wrap their heads around the many disparate, disconnected automation initiatives that may already exist within the organization— and how they can best be centralized and secured.
Automation Layer at the top of Enterprise Application Stack: An average large enterprise today uses 170+ different applications. Integration between these applications is a huge challenge as employees spend their valuable time bridging the gap: moving information between applications, for instance, and ensuring the consistency of that data. In the near future, we will see forward thinking enterprises resolve this problem by adding an automation layer to the top of their application stack which will contain connections and reusable components that can link applications and systems of records— along with key governance, maintenance, and developer capabilities. By reusing components from this layer, teams can build, test, and execute automations faster—while ensuring fast connections, reliable communication, and dependable data consistency across systems. Employees therefore would be free from manual repetitive tasks and can engage in higher value-added tasks.
Increased Adoption of Managed RPA Services: Many automation system integrators are taking advantage of the huge popularity of RPA and will introduce RPA-as-a-service (RPAaaS) model. Many SaaS organizations changed the way they worked without incurring additional maintenance costs, by innovating various solutions in the cloud; RPAaaS will provide the same benefits. RPAaaS will gradually reduce development and deployment costs and drive the need for deploying the most impactful and most reusable components.
Increased RPA Adoption among SMBs: The internal operations of SMBs usually consist of fewer steps and are less complex in nature, giving smaller businesses the potential to adopt RPA quicker than large enterprises can. In addition, as opposed to bigger enterprises where employees’ functions can be very narrow, SMBs’ employees are usually more familiar with a multitude of business processes, which makes it easier to develop effective automation paths.In 2022, SMBs with less than 1000 employees will participate in automation projects primarily triggered by RPA.
Greater Success and Better ROI via CEOs: An RPA Centre of Excellence (CoE) can help focus the attention, technology, and processes required for successfully scaling automation initiatives. Any organization that seeks to achieve business transformation should adopt and implement a CoE. RPA CoE will help create standards and best practices for the organization. This includes developing documentation, blueprints, and methodologies for tasks such as quality assurance, technical architecture and maintenance, performance monitoring, project, and resource planning among other tasks. COE can also help identify all the usable assets that exist within the enterprise and the CoE itself.
Semantic Automation: Today, even with drag-and-drop, low-code platforms, building complex automation can be a cumbersome process. That’s because developers have to tell the robot every single step to take and every rule to follow. But with semantic automation, the robot will already know the rules and the context, the patterns, and the relationships.
Cloud Native Architectures: Automation providers are increasingly embracing cloud-native architectures that leverage that delivers various platform capabilities however and wherever the customer wants them. Customers get the automation they want today—and can easily swap approaches tomorrow—without having to change procedures or reeducate employees. And with these architectures, even on-premises customers now have access to cloud-like flexibility, timeliness, and easy updates.
The latest RPA trends do not stop at these above-mentioned trends. With innovation and changing requirements, RPA is moving from being an option to a necessity for being sustainable. The benefits of RPA have become extensive for all organizations and in the post-COVID era, the adoption is expected to be even more rampant. RPA can open new skylines for every business and carry new potential to any organization to offer a superior and customized client experience.
