Is RPA the first step towards SkyNet?

Harrison Goode, Nice article! This tech was in existence throughout our careers. The basic screen scraping, and macros and key board mouse click recording were all there…even decades ago, we all had fun doing it. Now suddenly why this hype and scream of an impending doom on Skynet taking over. Well…someone…maybe, Skynet, thought of adding this prefix ‘Robotic’ to the vanilla process automation, transforming it into an out of the world technology. In early 90s I practically saw how Skynet took over by introducing PC into the mud stained hands of our farmers and transformed that bullock cart economy to the top economies of the world today. Now RPA and the allied technologies certainly will make a huge impact…but not the kind of impact I saw in the 90s. It will streamline the processes…and make it much efficient allowing the introduction of newer services and complexities, which mean more jobs. The only challenge is people. People should be willing to embrace change, update their competencies and be agile. If not you will go in obscurity the way the old telephone switch board operators went. Transform yourself and become the Skynet Capt. Lal CDCLLP.com

Hello, reality check. 1. RPA is not new. How can it be in it's infancy when most of the vendors are 10+ years old? As I've said before, the term "new" and "infancy" is a disguise by some vendors for the number of failed RPA projects at real scale. (See other threads from well established thought leaders). It's not a $5billion market for RPA alone in 3 years, that's just madness, it's a $5bn market when combined with all sorts of other transformation, automation, AI etc., and it will be a lot bigger than that. 2. The largest Robotic deployment I know of was implemented in 2006, at a Telco and got to as many as 30,000 bots, deployed across multiple BPO's for a large Telco. Still in production today! This is RPA attended. A year later we installed 20,000 bots in a PC manufacture. My first know sold RPA unattended was to a UK bank in 2007. Likely not the first, but certainly not "new". 3. Whilst it matters in attended (scale), it doesn't really matter how many "bots" there are deployed in RPA un-attended. If they are slow bots, and/or have been deployed inefficiently, you could have more for the wrong reasons.. More does not equal better. One customer replaced another RPA vendors with significantly less bots because they were much much faster (thus benchmarking needs to be part of pilot). Surely what matters is how many bots you have deployed successfully, at what cost (including Opex) and with what ROI (FTE savings, error rates, improved CX or reduced regulatory violations). Skynet was about machines becoming so intelligent, they could make more intelligent machines and take-over the world!! RPA is almost the opposite since most bots are doing mostly just rote rules based work that is likely already ear-marked for replacement, re-engineering or transformation. Keeping an old legacy system that can't easily transform a legacy company into a digital company is going to end up being a self-destruct button in years to come. You cannot compete without real change. Also, it is NOT a cost effective alternative to enterprise integration. It is a collaborator to successful enterprise integration, a stop-gap, an insurance policy, a bridge or faster time to value. So, whilst i enjoy hype as much as the next person, if we do not set customer expectations correctly, all we are going to do is create a near-term community of "I won't touch RPA with a barge pole" response. This response in fact, is what killed "screen scraping" as a response to "swivel chair integration". The technology did not so much kill screen scraping as much as the concern from IT that extending the life of tired systems was not viable long term.

The possibilities are profound. I wonder how a robotic Britain might contrast with a robotic North Korea in 50 years?

ROA is very effective at frustrating consumer/user complaints and support requests. This is taking jobs away from deserving call center workers in New Deli.