Top RPA Trends In 2022

If at any point through the business lifecycle you have brought digital transformation for discussion to the table, RPA would have been a buzzword among decision makers, regardless the size of the organization. The increasing investment towards the growing RPA trends that indicate digital transformation is now a priority for organizations. According to reports, the rising trend in RPA is expected to be rampant through 2024.

The IDC Worldwide Semi-annual Digital Transformation Spending Guide highlights that the digital transformation market using RPA is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of 17.1% for the whole period 2019-2023. According to a Gartner forecast, the global Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software revenue is projected to reach $1.89 billion in 2021, an increase of 19.5% from 2020.

What’s worth noting is that the adoption sentiment was not marred by the pandemic, showing significant trust in the technology. In fact if reports are to believed, RPA adoption has made significant contribution to mitigate business disruptions due to COVID-19.

It would be safe to say that companies will start to adopt RPA and other intelligent Automation technologies to continue being relevant in the near future. More importantly, the technology adoption will keep employees engaged and efficient, adding to RPA’s merit further.

Let us deep dive and walk through the top RPA trends in 2021.

1. Intelligent automation will be at the fore

   Smart Process Automation will redefine RPA in the near future. It can mine a given process and task, and when combined with machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, will build a data-driven picture of an operation.

   RPA tools can provide companies with insights from the repetitive tasks it carries out. The RPA bots will continue to evolve and continuously self-learn, using AI algorithms. It can not only enter and scan the data in IT processes, but also find patterns in them, doing away with the need to install AI and RPA separately. Intelligent Automation will pave way for better trial and error capabilities to find accurate and effective solutions.

2. RPA Will be the New ERP

   Remember how ERP became the go-to solution for all Global System Integrators (GSIs) and audit-based counselling organizations in the 1990s? The same GSIs will now train and motivate a large number of workforce to adopt automation.

   RPA’s explosive development can largely bridge the gap between legacy ERP processes and modern automation and create undisputable opportunities to sell business systems and launch new services to ensure higher customer satisfaction. 2021, RPA will come to be viewed as the right technology to fulfil the above mentioned functions.

3. RPA will incorporate process intelligence and cognitive automation

   Over the past years, with the rampant adoption of RPA, users have also come to identify the limitations of it scaling and adaptation. RPA vendors have now started to explore cognitive automation to plug in AI and ML capabilities to assist the RPA bots to make more complicated decisions.

   As organizations rapidly adopt RPA, they are also becoming more ambitious with its cognitive capabilities, to mimic human decision making. A Deloitte report suggests that 28% of those implementing and scaling RPA are also implementing cognitive automation, while only 6% of those that have not implemented RPA are progressing with cognitive automation.

4. Data privacy becomes a bigger concern for RPA

   The expanding usage of RPA, data discovery across process mining will also become prominent among its users. As data discovery becomes easier, the risks with it will be on the rise too.

   This will become particularly relevant as RPA will be linked to other technologies to enhance its core capabilities and security will come to the forefront. Companies using RPA will have an ethical and moral responsibility to address the threat and mitigate the risks that come with technology adoption.

5. Employee Experience will Become Significant

   We are all familiar with the focus on user experience over the past decade. In the recent past, companies are gradually shifting focus to a similar concept employee experience. Considering the makeshift changes the COVID-19 pandemic made to how companies operate, there was a considerable focus to improve and enhance employee wellbeing and experience, to enhance productivity and engagement.

   RPA can restructure existing working models to enhance human interactions between employees and conduct more strategic tasks meaningfully. However, on the contrary, poorly managed RPA efforts can trigger the feeling of discontentment among employees. Companies will start to focus on employee satisfaction as ardently as customer satisfaction.

6. Eliminating paperwork

   One of the most talked-about RPA future trends is the elimination of paperwork. RPA trends are growing towards intelligent bots for extracting, filing, and processing data online. The predetermined bots can eliminate paperwork and simultaneously ensure higher productivity for mundane paperwork-related activities.

7. RPA will become more affordable

   With large players like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon entering the RPA market, RPA licenses could become relatively cheaper and more affordable for smaller firms to adopt automation technologies.

RPA Trends - The Road ahead

The latest RPA trends do not stop at these 7. 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. Companies are looking for smarter solutions and more skilled workforce, to scale, after the uncertainty over the past year.

With the rise of RPA adoption among companies, there has been a significant rise in the belief that automation will directly impact jobs, traditionally done by humans. However, what one must note that automation will primarily take center stage to ease the burden of the repetitive, mundane tasks.

All the benefits of automation gain more weight when you scale RPA at an enterprise level. While it is true that RPA helps you after COVID-19 from the first steps of the automation journey, i.e., the pilot phase, scaling RPA makes further progress by standardizing your company’s approach to driving efficiencies.

Qentelli’s Take on the Future RPA Trends 

At Qentelli, we have experts who help you identify and build on your automation demands. We work with the best minds to streamline your productivity and even help you build a customized roadmap tailored to your needs.

We believe that our services will help you get started on your automation journey and help you determine which process to automate based on volume and repetitiveness and also the estimated ROI from the automation. Our experts can quickly analyze and identify processes that need improvement.

Get in touch with our experts today to transform your organization and be more attunes to the 'new normal'.