CIOInsider India Magazine

As the business world seems quite obsessed with tethering customer experience to the spindle of its functioning. It’s not surprising that most of the organizations find Robotic Process Automation ( RPA ) as an imperative tool that helps to automate the mundane tasks within business processes, save enormous amounts of time, and ensure on-time delivery with reduced costs Those three facets, however, arguably are the largest drivers of customer experience across the verticals.

Be it a boring amount of copy-paste work or run of the mill data entry jobs, RPA, unlike humans, performs them in seconds, round the clock, and most importantly, without man-made errors. Well, this exactly is the reason why RPA is in demand in various industry sectors, especially the industries like BFSI, Healthcare and Telecom that often get drowned in documentation.

Needless to say, the future looks unarguably bright for the RPA industry. Borrowing the findings of Gartner, the global RPA spending will reach $2.4 billion by 2022. That’s indeed a loud shout out for the budding & aspirant RPA developers as well. The market is largely driven by the increasing demand for business process automation (BPA) through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) & software robots and adoption of RPA technology by organizations.

According to Brandessence Market Research, the RPA market was dominated by Software with the largest market share of 60.46 percent in 2020. The process segment of RPA market report is dominated by automated solution segment with a market share of 59.45 percent. The application segment of robotic process automation market report is dominated by BFSI segment by capturing the largest market of 44.59 percent this year. Another study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) states that the adoption rates of robotic process automation (RPA) will grow by 57 percent in India in the next year.

Recently, we got to talking with with Raghuraman Ramamurthy, Founder & CEO, Rapid Acceleration Partners. “We envision Bot-as-a-Service as the way of the future with the convergence of AI, RPA and the cloud. RAP’s mission is to democratize this model making innovative technology highly accessible and affordable to companies of all sizes, with minimal development efforts and seamless cloud deployment," says Raghuraman, echoing the sentiments of several other Indian RPA solutions providers.

"Our focus is on industries such as hospitality management, shared services, healthcare, real estate and BFSI. Eventually, we plan to bundle RAPFlow and RAPBot into a seamless platform that caters to standard and custom use cases,” he adds.

Above all, it is important to look into the future of RPA as a technology. Currently, RPA is designed to deal with data through a predefined set of rules, but as the technology advances, the technologists are betting high on Process Mining and its capability to turn event logs based data into insights and actions.

Coupled with the evolution of AI & ML, this could well boost the rise of Smart(er) Process Automation (SPA) and in turn automating more and more cognitive tasks. In the aftermath, the times ahead will also witness an exponential increase in market need for service providers like robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) operators. We are talking about a whole world of business opportunities. In this issue, we shed the light on a stellar bunch of RPA solutions providers who are at the bleeding edge of things in the industry.

“Today, our focus is on advanced analytics and intelligent automation. What we see happening is that companies are moving from pure RPA to include AI capabilities: document understanding, predictive analytics and some are even combining cognitive capabilities to create virtual workers who assist the team with repetitive activities such as booking supplier invoices or claims processing. Looking into the future, we are investing in ‘voice-operated robot automation’. Today, we have Alexa and Siri in our personal lives. Why not ask a digital assistant to perform an action or create a report for the office too?” asks Lahiru Fernando, Development Lead, Asia, Boundaryless.

It is quite clear that RPA and other automated services have been growing since the lockdown started and the organizations started to adopt remote work. The IDC report said a government-owned postal service automated 25 processes to maintain financial journals, managing credit uploads and more. The Industry stakeholders say in single voice that not only the private companies, but also the public sector too has adopted automation. The future looks bright!