RPA for every employee..

They say plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. So I'm flattered. Everyone seems to now be talking about the importance of Robotic Desktop Automation (or RPA attended). A Robot on every workers desk!

Since 2005, when we started OpenSpan to specifically and uniquely give every worker a robot (we didn't call it RPA back then, but neither did anyone else), we have delivered personal robots to 100's of 1000's desktops all over the globe. One Bank started with over 20,000 desktop bots. Another telco started with over 35,000 desktop bots. We grew fast. Another manufacturing company had 20,000 bots. This was over 13 years ago, not yesterday! Many telcos have over 10,000 bots and many other industries have many 1000's each apiece. One FS company is just moving from 2000 bots to 20,000 Each of these customers were mostly deployed live to all these desktops in under 6-12 months. Yes, virtually all, in under 1 year.

And only now, RPA vendors want to tell you about this technology as if it's new!

Is it no coincidence that when RPA headlines started to become less about Robotic Nirvana and more about "why RPA fails" or "why doesn't RPA scale", we started reading that AI and ML will be the game-changer to deliver that scale? Now, RPA vendors are talking about using RPA Attended to reach out and run a robot on every desk as if they invented it! And some of the analysts are buying into it, hook, line and sinker.

In 2005, we recognized that automating 10%, 20% or even 50% of every person, was better than trying to automate 100% of a few people. That's the primary difference between RPA attended (RDA) and RPA unattended. The latter telling you that automating 100% or most of what people do will scale. Yeah, right! Rarely happens.

Pre OpenSpan, in 2005, this wasn't possible. But then but we built a technology, so advanced, it could automate complex applications on the desk, whilst the human was still working. This is also 20x to 100x faster than the techniques used today by most RPA vendors to deliver their RPA unattended solutions. Not only was our RPA unique (patented) and fast, it could allow a user to work in any resolution, in any language and even with the applications, hidden, minimized or off-screen. It could automate multiple apps simultaneous and combine with RPA unattended as well. Most RPA vendors products can't do that for most applications (except the easy ones) but that hasn't stopped them now jumping on the RPA attended band-wagon and messaging recently. With new messages like "A Robot on every desktop" or a "give a robot to every worker".

Like I said, plagiarism in good but let me give you fair warning. One RPA vendor has deployed 20,000 robots in a supposed "attended" fashion but now the customer is looking to replace them. Why? Because they are actually RPA unattended robots that a user has to "watch" - I call this "Fake Robots" or "watched RPA unattended". Sure, they take over some mundane work but they can often be very slow and the user is mostly not allowed to even use the mouse whilst they are running, let alone touch the keyboard or change the screen resolution. This is just silly. It's screen scraping of old. It might work for some but does not work for most. Employees sitting twiddling their thumbs in the back office whilst the bot runs does not a happy employee make- and in the front office, on a phone call, these attended robots are so slow as to hardly impact the call times at all.

And there are some RPA vendors that still want to call RPA attended a screen scraper, or an out-of-control Virus. Nothing could be further from the truth to justify their investors dollars they are the best! These people simply don't take the time to learn the technology and frustrate me - but I can only laugh and suggest they call the many hundreds of customers we have, in a magnitude of governed and audited industries, with 10's of 1000's of bots, that would violently disagree with you.

I won't bore you by going down my own memory lane of old screen scraping to our advanced Deep Robotics (as OpenSpan perfected). You are welcome to bore yourself here where I started writing about this as far back 2007 but here's a more recent one I wrote when so called RPA analysts and RPA experts were telling us all that no-one cared about Personal Robots, RDA or RPA attended.

Now, with our Robotics, RPA attended and unattended, benefitting from being part of Pega's world-leading Digital Process Automation platforms for AI, ML, No-Code, BPM, Dynamic Case management, Centralized and governed rules engine, Data virtualization, IOT, IVA, NLP and much more, you and your robots can have your cake, and eat it. Layer by Layer!

Enjoy ;