Nearly two thirds of organizations globally have active RPA initiatives that have produced an average ROI of 250 percent, according to the results of a new study. Bay Area RPA technology provider Automation Anywhere polled executives from companies across 11 business sectors including financial, insurance, energy, transportation, manufacturing, retail and government and found that, in addition to the vast majority of companies being in at least the planning stages with RPA, AI initiatives and RPA are strongly aligned in most organizations.
Over the next 24 months, according to Now & Next: State of RPA, executives polled expect spending on RPA and AI to remain strong despite (and in many ways, because of) the economic upheaval caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. IT decision makers rate only cybersecurity and cloud migration ahead of RPA as technology priorities. For the moment, however, the actual number of workers that benefit from the lightened workload automation provides is low, leaving plenty of headroom for growth.
“Typically, only between 9.9 percent and 14.1 percent of employees use bots to help them with their work today,” the report’s authors note. “Given estimates of potential users and top performers’ beliefs that up to 90 percent of their organization’s employees could potentially use automation imply significant growth possibilities.”