Are you going to outgrow your automation platform?

Veterans in the process automation industry might be feeling a bit bruised at the moment. RPA programmes have proved typically difficult to succeed with.

Beyond the business cynicism, the vendor models make it difficult to achieve good returns, reliability can be questionable and architecture can be, well, problematic at best.

The market turned away from pure RPA to Hyperautomation, recognising that greater benefits could be realised by shifting left and creating structured data earlier in the process. Some even started to turn to machine learning to make predictions which would otherwise have demanded human experience.

Process Orchestration models (Appian, Pega, Enate) make some attempt to wrangle process activities into a modular order, and take on the management of sequencing workflow, along with integration to a greater or lesser degree.

Now, GenerativeAI is the prodigal son, the new ‘shiny thing’ which does indeed have huge potential to turn the market inside out, and has left RPA somewhat in the shadows.

The future will be AI enabled action models which learn processes autonomously by watching agents activity (think task capture but on steroids), and then implement with minimal need for coding. AI infused RPA will become immensely powerful and the need for any repetitive activities in organisations will disappear.

In the meantime, we still need to overcome the key barriers to progress – high TCO and inefficient licence utilisation, production management and architectural agility. In short, you need a platform that is flexible to your needs, only costs when you use it, and that grows with you and sets you up for the future rather than becoming a limitation, like the shell on a hermit crab.

Choose an agile cloud based platform with consumption based pricing that gives native access to market leading technologies. Think big – an ‘automation platform’ rather than RPA or any of the individual derivatives.