The proliferation of remote working solutions is leading companies towards greater adoption of Automated processes. Adoption rates of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) will grow by 57% in India in the next year, according to a study conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC) and commissioned by Automation Anywhere.
The research firm surveyed technology executives across India and 1,600 of Automation Anywhere’s own customers.
The study also found that 56% of organizations in the country plan to deploy digital workers and software bots to work directly with their human employees. About 76% of the surveyed companies said they have volumes of rules-based and repetitive tasks that are currently managed by human resources.
“As the nature of jobs and work changes after the pandemic, digital workers will add value beyond ROI to help organizations develop new capabilities and business models. Automation will become a business imperative for driving innovation, customer centricity, and gaining efficiencies,” said Rishu Sharma, Principal Analyst, Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI), at IDC India.
“We see more and more customers looking for end-to-end automation and partners who can bring both Cognitive and RPA capabilities in a fully integrated fashion. RPA vendors that can provide the same have an additional edge in the future,” said Sajesh Gopinath, General Manager & Go To Market Leader – UST SmartOps, at UST, a digital technology and transformation company.
According to Milan Sheth, executive vice president, IMEA, Automation Anywhere, implementation of RPA is divided between front office, back office and employees themselves.
Sheth said more digital collaboration is happening with humans in the front office, like financial institutions using RPA to process know-your-customer documents etc. Companies are employing digital assistants to work with employees in order to scale up the business.
Sheth added that the company has also seen a big change in the employee experience, where companies follow a hybrid model between working from home and working from the office. “If you are an internal employee and you are spending 20-30% of your time in uploading and processing reports, filing weekly summaries etc, all of that the bots can do for you,” he said. Digital collaboration is also helping in such activities.
RPA and other automated services have been growing since March last year when global lockdowns led companies to adopt remote work. Industry stakeholders say not only private companies, but the public sector has adopted automation. The IDC report said a government-owned postal service automated 25 processes to maintain financial journals, managing credit uploads and more.