#96 The Future of RPA. 2024 Edition

Welcome back to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Yeah, happy new year everyone. We hope you had a good start into the new year and yeah, So with the year just started, yeah, I think it's always nice to look a bit ahead what might be coming up over the next months, next 12 months or so. And yeah, and of course with me here as always is Arno. Hello, Arno, how are you?

I'm well, Sascha, how are you doing?

Good. Yeah, nice. First episode in 2024. And yeah, just looking back into 2023, it has been a busy year in intelligent automation, was no doubt. Yeah, low-code, no-code, AI, in particularly generative AI. So yeah, very, very busy last year. Yeah, but today We will be looking into the future a bit, as I mentioned. And yeah, we have selected a couple of questions from the community on the topic RPA. For everyone who's not so familiar, RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. So yeah, in this episode we will cover— we talk about the future of RPA. And yeah, with that, Arno, do you like to grab the first, first question we have?

Yeah, sure. And thanks for all listeners for all their support in 2023. We very much look forward to a lot more exciting podcasts in 2024. Of course, like Sasha mentioned, talking about all the progressive technologies, I think AI is probably going to be becoming more mainstream. So I guess the first question with that sort of context is looking at the future scope of RPA, and, you know, what's the place of RPA in the sort of 2024 and beyond years? And, you know, as me and Sasha is talking a lot on this podcast about RPA, we all know that, you know, it exists in a lot of organizations, out there. And, you know, it, it, it's obviously a capability that helps you automate repetitive human-centric tasks. And we feel that its potential to, to automate these tasks is, is, is really just the, the starting point of RPA. I think that whole simulating a human, doing what a human does based on observing human behavior and then effectively copying that behavior into a bot is really just a starting point. And I think that's the sort of the lowest level of the value it provides. I think that, you know, we're going to see a lot more organizations, you know, take the leap with automation and, you know, exploring more possibilities across their business of where to apply RPA specifically, there's obviously still a lot of companies out there that we talk to that know about RPA, but they haven't started their first RPA initiative yet. And I think as we start this new year, a top priority for these organizations will be to look at these RPA specifically that I'm talking about now, but also to kind of look at automation probably in more general terms and get started with that in order to minimize their costs, for example, boosting their customer services and really finding new ways to offer more secure services around the services that provide easier governance and compliance. And all of that, sort of, if we look at the environment as well, and I think there's a big drive towards being carbon zero. So I think that this technology really lends itself pretty well in that sort of roadmap still. It is quite mainstream. It has been around for a while, and I think for some of the late adopters, RPA is going to be something that's definitely on their radar still. Regardless if they start with the, I would say, the baseline RPA sequences where it is just mimicking human behavior and mimicking what humans does, not necessarily any intelligence in it. And then sort of one step up from that, we can't just look at RPA as just that. I think Sascha mentioned generative AI. And, you know, I think that that will become the next sort of, I guess, adoption strategy or adoption catalyst where obviously there's a lot of advances being made in AI. It's becoming a bit more accessible. People understand the use cases better. And, you know, I think that combined with RPA will really sort of help unlock, you know, even better efficiency and better productivity, you know, for these customers of ours that perhaps, you know, just looking at RPA or have got sort of initial RPA initiatives that's deployed and they have got some automations and they're looking for something that would actually make that, I guess, a bit more intelligent, you know, looking for that next level of savings that bringing in AI can provide. So I think RPA is still very much on people's minds. I think if you look at RPA vendors, they're investing a lot in their technologies, software. I think we see a lot of peripheral things, value-added things arriving as well. And I think as the organizations out there understand more about the capabilities, I think it's still going to be a a sort of a core element of the intelligent automation space in 2024.

Yeah, so yeah, that brings me to the question we have received from the community: is RPA still relevant in 2024? Yeah, based on what you just said, Arno, yeah, the short answer clearly is yes. I know over the last couple of years with other technologies and other platforms emerging, RPA was sort of thought to be nearly like a dead horse going forward. So it was predicted that it will not be that particularly important anymore, but it still shows it is a very useful automation tool. And because the vendors out there are also broadening their capabilities, isn't it? So they're moving away from a pure-play RPA to do more. So AI is one thing you just mentioned, but they also, they adding other capabilities in there. Some are adding workflow automation capabilities and case management capabilities around their RPA. Some other, we know some other workflow automation, case automation vendors, they adding RPA into it. So to become a big platform to cover the whole end-to-end in all different ways. And yeah, lots of enterprises are taking RPA to the next level. And of course, by using it, always finding new ways to achieve total digital transformation. There's so many use cases out there. We talk a lot about where you can apply RPA to, what you can do with it, particularly in specific departments. And there's so much more to do, I guess, in companies. I think the companies who are thinking RPA was not useful, they failed with their approach. I think that's the problem, unfortunately, in lots of companies. Sometimes you concentrate on a very, very difficult and huge use case, so to get sort of really good return of investment. And some companies, they're not they're not looking at it like, okay, it's a cycle. Let's start with something and then grow with it and have the excitement across the organization grown over time. So not every organization is doing it. And there we often see people saying, okay, RPA is a failure, it's not useful. And I am 100% still can say No, I don't believe you. And I think if you do it right, you will find hundreds of use cases in larger organizations which benefit from RPA, especially now combining RPA with all the new automation tools available. Yeah, so as we mentioned, RPA is so well suited for handling a lot of these repetitive tasks and they are clearly hundreds and thousands of these repetitive tasks out there in organizations. Yeah, I think the key is to make it more accessible to the so-called citizen developers, to the business people, and let them use it and let them see it and let them experience the amazing results. So business will get a lot more out of it and Yeah, and that's what we are seeing in the future. Automation anyway is a trend. So if it's workflow automation, process automation, business process automation, all sorts of different terms are flying around. But I think the key is that citizen developers in business, they need to just get their hands on it and see the results. First small and then grow with it.

Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. There's nothing I can add to that. And I think the next question here was, you know, is it here to stay or will it become obsolete? Which is again sort of, you know, it links up with the relevancy. And, you know, from what we see, that RPA platforms out there are becoming broader. You know, companies like UiPath, Blue Prism, They are adding other offerings as well, including sort of capabilities around business process automation. So I think it is sort of merging into that space where we know that standalone RPA itself perhaps doesn't unlock all of the benefits. But if you combine it with process automation, for example, workflow automation, intelligent document processing, you throw AI in the mix there for intelligent decision making, that in itself is for us a very good sign that, you know, RPA is here to stay. There will be multiple new layers that's going to be stacked on top of it, and it certainly won't become obsolete because I think, like I mentioned earlier, it will be a core technology where if there is a mundane task that you want to automate, you want to take the human away from that, you know, that's the kind of first baseline of— it might be a very small initiative where you want to remove a shared inbox where you receive, let's say, help desk tickets or complaints. And, you know, a bot can easily read those emails and effectively, you know, at a very, very simplistic way, go write an entry into a spreadsheet. And, you know, people can— not that I say this is the best way of doing it, but, you know, they can actually work on a, let's say, Excel Online spreadsheet and have some sort of collaboration. The business process management side of that is, is where you then create perhaps an application where those tickets are logged and you have a dashboard. If there's any intelligent document processing, we talk a lot about that. Let's say this same inbox has got a loan application or application for a new account, and there's some contracts or some terms and conditions that needs to be generated and signed. Those are all kind of bolt-ons that I would say it's gonna become a sort of a broader platform. And again, a lot of these tools that we see is becoming a lot more no-code in terms of the tooling. So it's effectively, if you're a person that understands your process, especially if you understand your existing process and you understand where you wanna be, you can pick up a tool and sort of run with your first automation pretty quickly. You know, I think that it is a case of, you know, the more you use it, the more you see the benefits, perhaps the more you'll invest in a wider team. You might in the future then decide to have more of a technical team because that will obviously unlock additional benefits that you can extract from the platform that perhaps a novice citizen developer can't do. Do you know what I mean? So it kind of goes, it's not just about broadness, you can go deep as well. So I think that, you know, you can choose the right balance for your business. Is this something that you want to kind of create governance around where you want people to purely be sort of citizen developers, create their own automations, have a virtual assistant that makes their life easy for their sort of day-to-day tasks and jobs they perform, or do you want to go more kind of IT-led where, you know, you actually have a sort of dimension in your project team or, you know, your sort of automation team that can actually exploit some of the, I would say, more advanced features to just unlock a bit more of the benefits, you know, that RPA combined with these other technologies that I'm talking about can provide for you.

Yeah, I think you mentioned that a bit earlier, intelligent document processing. I think with that being available for more low-code and no-code, non-technical business users, I think that will make it so much easier to have a broader use nowadays. These platforms come was, yeah, was a good set of pre-configurations, something we didn't see in the market a couple of years ago. It was still quite complex to get good document classification and extraction. So nowadays, yeah, with a few configurations you can be up and running and achieve so much more in end-to-end processing by, by, yeah, by, by understanding invoices straight away because of the, the AI power we have these days. So you can just have a document and get, for example, OpenAI, look at it, it will, it will be nearly spot on all the time. So that, that all that was not available a couple of years ago. So this power is now in the hands of non-technical business people and Yeah, so absolutely, RPA combined with all these things, IDP, AI automations, which do not— ultimately will not require that human in the loop anymore. Yeah, so RPA will not be obsolete because of the combined power.

Yeah, no, I again, I totally agree with all of that, and I think that with the sort of adoption of OpenAI increasing and becoming bigger and bigger, people will realize that, you know, you can actually spin up your own GPTs and your own models. And, you know, all of that is all no-code. So you can start training these models and plugging them into RPA. You know, this stuff is not, magic. You know, it's not something that, you know, only experts in that field can do it. You know, it's— I mean, this goes as far as if you look at GPTs, for example, it's self-descriptive. You can actually ask it, how do I use you? And it will tell you.

Yeah, the programming language going forward is English. That's what it is.

Exactly. So, and I think that conversational element of it is really, really interesting, especially for, you know, citizen developers or people that want to be citizen developers that want to exploit or want to play around with these technologies and potentially doesn't know where to start. You know, that's just such a broad area of information that's available to you in order to understand perhaps how to integrate AI with RPA, perhaps what are the kind of use cases that you need to look at if you combine those two technologies. So I think that in itself will strengthen RPA And, you know, again, we can see that in the market, you know, the RPA market, you know, the RPA implementations out there are big, you know, we talk a lot about starting small, but, you know, we see fairly, fairly big adoption, you know, where there's sometimes, you know, tens or hundreds of robots you know, in, in, in companies doing automations. And, and this is becoming such a key element of, of their business because it, it is a workforce, right? Where this workforce is, is doing tasks at a cost that is a lot cheaper than a human. And, you know, I think that this, this, this sort of higher productivity that it drives is actually also driving the market to get, you know, bigger. And, you know, they predict by sort of early 2025, 70% of all enterprises in industries, you know, will have engaged in a sort of digital business model, a transformation model, some sort of transformation program, you know, to implement sort of automation So, you know, and that's quite a broad sort of market if you think about that.

Yeah, with that, of course, I think it's about time to look into the actual trends in RPA. So that was a question from the community. What are then the trends in RPA for the next year? And Yeah, when we look into that, number one big trend of course will be generative AI plus intelligent automation. Yeah, I think with so much more investment going into these areas by every business this year, yeah, I think everyone will be focusing on that one and see what kind of results they can achieve. And yeah, we will be covering lots of more use cases this year, especially around generative AI and intelligent automation. So yeah, everyone can benefit from what's actually going on throughout the year. Yeah, next one, digital worker-first processes. Yeah, that obviously makes sense with the power of more AI in our RPA implementations. We can now assume that the digital worker can do these processes end-to-end. And yeah, we will focus on that a bit more. Evolving from pure play to platform play, we already see that in the market. All these vendors in the BPM, low-code, and RPA area, they have already diversified and they broadened the platform and enhanced the platforms. So that will continue to happen. And instead of just connecting into maybe an OpenAI or other AIs, more sort of out-of-the-box capabilities will come in as well. So, and then, yeah, we know there are lots of different specialties and sector focuses of some RPA vendors. So we probably see that that pure capability in these, or enhancing these platforms with capabilities specifically maybe for the financial sector or maybe for the services sector and health sector. So we probably see a few more of those positionings happening as well. Yeah, and of course, RPA is not just experimental anymore. So over the years it has grown and is stronger. So there will be more strategic application within organizations. And yeah, so very exciting to hear about all these case studies and successes. So we will monitor that space and we'll share success stories as well. Better user accessibility for citizen developers. We touched on that earlier. These platforms, they will come with built-in capabilities so that the non-technical business users can get things going from IDP to GenAI usage. Everything will be very easy to do, of course. I know you mentioned that these platforms are good for non-technical users to start with, but then if you bring a really technical person in, maybe a couple of coders, you can use that platform to the maximum.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And of course, ethical automation and ESG compliance, that will be an ongoing topic going forward. And The RPA platforms will provide everything to support that. And of course, data privacy, security, and governance is more important than ever. I think that question comes up a lot with the AI. I think going forward next, in the next couple of months, we will see more focus on that. How does an RPA implementation together with GenAI can still adhere to very strict security requirements. So yeah, that will definitely be a focus. Yeah, and I think that will be the trends in RPA.

Yeah, and I think just touching on, you know, what is the future of RPA solutions, and I think that you know, there's a lot of surface scratching still happening in process automation. I think RPA will continue to evolve and, you know, into this offering that includes AI, meaningful AI as well, practical AI, things we can actually see and understand, you know, not complicated bespoke models. I think more, more AI that is based on the OpenAI principles, that's easily consumed. And, you know, we, we, we still gonna see solutions where we are gonna automate repetitive rule-based tasks, but also, you know, we're gonna see automation of more complicated tasks that perhaps requires more intelligence, you know. And I think that the, the RPA and the process automation worlds will come closer and closer together where, you know, an RPA bot is perhaps just gonna be another stakeholder in a, in a sort of a, a workflow that does a job. And then perhaps as businesses actually, you know, look at their processes and, and optimize it, perhaps more of the, the manual task with inside that workflow will be replaced by RPA, especially even tasks which you deem to be complicated where human judgment is required, where you could perhaps have some intelligence around there to say, well, if this invoice has got a purchase order, it does match the purchase order amount, it is below a certain threshold. It's cheaper for us to pay that invoice than to actually send it to finance for checking because that, that's an objective decision that we make based on the AI. And again, that just kind of drives the costs down, down. I think the other thing that if we look at sort of RPA solutions and it's sort of been the elephant in the room over the last couple of years is, is things around security and compliance here. If RPA bot actually signs off a contract or agrees to a contract, you know, or rates a transaction, you know, who's liable? Is it actually the human or is it the bot? So I think all of that's becoming a bit more clear now for people. And I think the sort of whole governance frameworks around RPA is starting to mature a lot. You know, security is, is been a big, big focus point for vendors. Security has been a big discussion point as well. You know, where the responsibility lies, governance around that. And I think it, it's becoming a bit more from an acceptance perspective, an adoption perspective, especially around, I guess, business leaders, people that's interested in compliance, you know, it's becoming easier to to actually answer those questions. And I think, you know, if you look at financial services or healthcare, I think more and more of them will actually start to adopt a digital workforce, especially in healthcare, where perhaps a few years ago you wouldn't, you know, quote unquote, trust the robot to make a decision. But I think if it's powered by a sort of objective intelligence based on you know, machine learning, that, that, that will become a lot more accessible. And, you know, as, as you look into the future as well, all of these technologies will be, you know, with, with, with inside reach of, of business users. I think that the user accessibility and intuitive designers for, for these tools, especially around process design, RPA process design, you know, is becoming better, it's becoming more accessible, it's easier. There's a lot more templates, there's a lot more, I suppose, you know, starter solutions and starter packs and frameworks and by industry that people can use as an accelerator. And then, you know, just again, combining that with low and no-code development tools, I think, you know, that will just sort of broaden the adoption by various people as well, that this is of interest. And, you know, not just business leaders that's interested in productivity and profitability, but I think also heads of departments, individual users that they really just want to have a work balance with these types of activities that they do, that's convenient and that's acceptable and not having to do work where it's mundane, it's boring, and it doesn't really add any value, you know. So I think the whole democratization of RPA is becoming, you know, more and more, and we could see that. And, you know, I think that for the future, I think we'll see that more in the solutions as well, more of the solutions that people create. And it's very exciting. It's absolutely exciting.

Absolutely. Yeah, this is always a lot with these new technologies or with expanding these technologies. It's still a lot like chicken and egg. So the more people, business owners can see the results coming out of it, the more, and then suddenly the more they want it. So was OpenAI and tapping into your company knowledge, because that's what the next level will be for lots of businesses because they will not pump all the information into the the common generic model which is out there publicly. So they will use that or with their data and knowledge. And that will be very exciting to see how good the AI will then be involved in that overall workflow. So very exciting to see. And I think this year will be really the first time bigger companies are really jumping on it because last year was like, oh, great, amazed. And then if you use cases, proof of concepts. But now I think this year will be a lot of actually start using these technologies much, much wider. So yeah, very exciting indeed. Yeah, with that we come to an end of our episode. And yeah, 2024 and beyond will be clearly very exciting for all things process and automation. And any business of any size can make use of these automation technologies. We, we, we, we have, oh, this is a huge— when you look, look low-code and no-code platforms, we, we know obviously a lot of enterprise platforms, but there's so many out there. So depending on whatever, whatever business size you are, you will find a solution and a platform which sort of fits your, your company size, your budget, etc. So, um, yeah, if you haven't looked at automation so far, uh, now is 100% the right time to start. And yeah, and if you're already doing and need a few new perspectives, join us here on the next episodes and visit us at theautomationguys.net and join our community there. So lots of like-minded people are exchanging ideas and brainstorm and experiment with automation. And of course, feel free to get in touch with Arno and myself via the social channels or on theautomationguys.net within the community. Yeah, and thanks a lot for tuning in today. We will be back with another episode very soon, and until then, let's automate it.