RPA will continue on the growth trajectory, expand its coverage of use-cases.
This is an exclusive interview conducted by Santosh Vaswani, Content Writer & Editor at CIO News with Neeraj Gupta, Director-IT at Mercer on Trends of Robotic Process Automation in 2022.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a very hot topic and a trending term on Google and multiple other forums continuously for last 4-5 years, said Neeraj Gupta, Director-IT at Mercer, in an exclusive interview with CIO News. “So, I would like to share some trends focused around RPA that I see in 2022. Some of these are continuing ones, but will gain further momentum.”
He said, “The first trend is that there are no talks about saturation yet in the market of RPA, which means that the market will be maintaining the growth momentum”. In the last couple of years the market has grown upwards of 50% and will continue to grow in 2022. Existing customers are scaling up and leading RPA vendors have reported customer retention in excess of 100% which means there is revenue growth on existing customers. Also, the number of new customers adopting RPA will be increasing.
“The second trend is the talent war, which will continue in 2022. Despite all the appreciable efforts put in by RPA vendors in making their own universities and learning content available to larger community of developers and analysts – the fact is that the demand for talented resources is still more than the supply”.
He further said, “The third major trend I see is a focused shift from a full-time-employee (FTE)-Release mind-set towards providing a better overall customer/employee experience”. Generally, RPA was focused on giving efficiency benefits to the business, so that freed-up human workforce could be utilised in other areas of business. But now the focus is shifting and in 2022 we will see automation of those tasks that have very low transactional volumes, but are still boring for a human. E.g.: Triggering a notification to the entire team as soon as a shared file gets updated, so that everyone is aware of the changes. These use-cases were always pushed down the priority earlier.
“Next I would like to highlight that 2022 will see people moving away from traditional RPA. When I say that, I mean people will start mixing up the native UI-based RPA with API-based automation wherever possible – as compared to considering these as two opposite ends that never meet! All major vendors have started calling out this integration explicitly in their product portfolio now”, he added.
“Another trend I see next is Platform consolidation. There are a lot of RPA vendors in this market and in some big organisations different business units have adopted different tools over time. But scaling all of them together beyond a point is not worthwhile. Hence there is a need of consolidation. This will also fuel growth of RPA migration tools. We will see new options to facilitate migration from one platform to another. This might not be 100% successful in one go due to multiple incompatibilities across various RPA platforms, but the trend pick up”, he said
“Another point is related to the hype around Digital transformation and AI/ML adoption. What I see is that this will only fuel further more usage of RPA. RPA will now orchestrate the entire business flow – it will use natural language processing (NLP) or Data extraction service or a machine learning model in the background, depending on use case – but users will see RPA performing the entire transaction. So, Robotic Process Automation will stay at the forefront encapsulating other technologies”, he said.
He added, “My last point is that Open source RPA platforms will gain ground”. They will allow organizations to experiment quickly without upfront investments. However, the big four will still continue to enjoy the largest pie.
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