While Covid-19 has reinforced the need for automation as an important way to augment business continuity plans, the pandemic has made scaling automation problems more difficult in the short term, a new report says.
A Forrester survey of 45 companies in the Asia-Pacific region found stay-at-home orders that resulted in remote work accelerated new adoption of RPA, but the pandemic did not result in significant expansion of “first-wave” RPA companies (businesses with RPA programs in place for 18 months or more). The APAC region accounts for 17 percent of worldwide global RPA sales, the report says.
Organizations that are newer to the technology are benefitting in some ways from holding out.
“Second-wave adopters set new expectations from the market. Such firms represent the newer wave of participants in the automation market,” according to Leslie Joseph. Principal analyst at Forrester Research. “Their programs emerged in the context of a changing market landscape; today, both vendors and practitioners have a better understanding of the best practices for and pitfalls of automation.”
Recent adopters, therefore, understand they can demand less risk in implementation, better support, and accelerated deployment. They also have access to solutions that incorporate more AI components or prebuilt integrations from their vendor partners.