RPA meets Intelligent Automation

I'm off to Vegas to attend one of the worlds largest Intelligent Automation events - #PegaWorld by @Pegasystems. Five thousand attendees "counting" their lucky "stars" and ready to jump onto the digital end to end robotic automation train - all under one very large (MGM) roof!

In 2016, 10 years into OpenSpan, the RPA company I helped found with our advanced RPA attended and RPA unattended technology, I felt it was time for RPA to be part of something bigger. Intelligent Automation: something the rest of the RPA industry is now perhaps finally waking up to!

Thus we sold to Pegasystems 3 years ago and I haven't stood still since. What a ride. I feel this decision was also vindicated a year later by @Forrester, who put Pega into the leading quadrant for Intelligent Automation, or as they call it, Digital Process Automation (DPA). This decision and being identified as the leader in this wave clearly laid down the gauntlet with the claim that RPA is just less than 8% of the weight of digital transformation. They identified that many other technologies are needed to become truly digital. RPA is certainly one of those technologies but it is clearly not THE technology behind IA. It can never be. I even think 8% is overly generous and judging by the lack of scale so many enterprises are reaching with RPA unattended alone, I don't think I'm wrong!

I love RPA and I think it has its place. I have lived and breathed RPA (UI automation) for over 35 years, under different names and brands. I have made my living and raised my loving family on RPA. I have also delivered many of the worlds largest deployments and have been responsible for over a million user desktop licenses being sold to optimize computer / human interactions. I know how all of the different RPA technologies work, from the simplest to the most complex. But despite what you sometimes read, RPA is always only ever only going to be a tactical piece of technology in an ever growing field of serious strategic intelligent alternative technologies.

When you look at what's going on in the Intelligent Automation space, you will clearly see automating legacy systems through the UI with RPA creates limited (if any) opportunity to become "digital". And, just calling RPA, "intelligent", or throwing in terms like AI or ML on-top of RPA, just doesn't cut it. We agree, using AI and ML (and NLP) on unstructured documents and emails is awesome, and if you want, you can automate many of these things, right out of the box today, all from within the Pega Platform. Our platform also comes with bundled RPA licenses to plug any strategic automation technology gaps, perhaps that can be used to drive urgent operational efficiency programs or perhaps just to tide you over when you don't have API's or web services into existing systems yet. Even better, you can optionally automate and manage entire end to end processes with RPA combined with the other Intelligent Automation components that come already installed with the Pega DPA platform.

RPA vendors are now chasing partnerships with other DPA leaders (check out the Forrester wave) to catch up in this Intelligent Automation race. Or they partnering with other web services technologies to add AI/ML capability as bolt-ons. This is great, and we can do this too, but better still, we have many of these technologies already built into Pega DPA today. We have customers putting billions of interactions through our central AI system, not by throwing this data over the internet to 3rd party technology stacks (unless you prefer to), or by being forced to buy other technologies, but by living within the same eco system, on the same cloud, or on the same on-premise infrastructure, out of the box. These included RPA, AL, ML, Intelligent OCR/Email NLP, low-code, case management, BPM, Rules engines, security systems and much more, all work together today, in perfect harmony - and even if you only choose to start with one of them, using the next one tomorrow, happens with a few clicks in the platform.

So, the good news is, Intelligent Automation or DPA is here to stay. Whether you want to start with just RPA, in any of our 3 modes (Unattended, Attended or listen (WFI) ), or want to start with other use cases our customers are now already doing, it's all there. Such as, using Pega's AI to reduce churn by 14% in a telco or to drive 10x more leads for a banking client. Or perhaps using Pega's CX, built on DPA, to reduce policy change request times by 50% just as we did for an insurance company, or saving $100m / year with a new dealer application in an automative client or lowering customer churn by 400% for a financial services company. Or even just use the DPA platform by itself to process 23m transactions annually in a new digital web application that replaced an old paper/legacy one, or with a healthcare company, improving productivity by 66%. The operational efficiency gains you demand are often not going to come from a few RPA bots scattered around in silos across your organization, though they might (we have clients with 10's of 1000's of bots today). No, the reality is, to drive real change, with exponential savings, at great scale, you need DPA which comes with all the RPA bots you need, if and when you need them!

All of this and more and we talk about it all the time. However, we feel it's better to hear our customers talk about it too. Check out the PegaWorld link and enjoy the show! It's there for all to see ; https://www.pega.com/events/pegaworld, whether you are one of the 5000, or not!

What you thinking? You with me?