RPA Will Reshape Our World in 2021 and Beyond

The year 2020 was a watershed moment for automation. The challenges posed by the global pandemic – in which many businesses had to move operations remotely, nearly overnight – forced CIOs to turbocharge digital transformation and start executing on their 2025 digital transformation strategies – five years earlier than many had planned.

A May 2020 report from Forrester Research asserted that the pandemic resulted in a shift in "automation psychology" that will spark an 18- to-24-month period of rapidly accelerating automation.

The RPA Revolution: How Automation Will Redefine Work in the 2020s

2019 marked the year we crossed the tipping point for robotic process automation (RPA) adoption. A recent report from Futurum Research — commissioned by Automation Anywhere — discovered that more than half of North American businesses today have adopted intelligent automation.  

These findings show that RPA is no longer an emerging technology but rather a mission-critical component for businesses, driving immense value due to its ability to automate labor-intensive tasks so that humans can refocus their efforts to work that drives impact and satisfaction.

Bringing RPA to Its Next Frontier: The Cloud

The next RPA frontier

Introduction

The adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) continues to accelerate. In fact, according to Gartner,  it’s the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market, with revenue increasing 63.1% to $846 million in 2018. Gartner forecasts RPA software revenue will reach $1.3 billion in 2019.

Despite these extraordinary figures, we have not yet reached the precipice of where this transformative technology will take global enterprise and society as a whole.

Transforming the Role of the CIO With AI

The potential of artificial intelligence, particularly in the form of a digital workforce, to dramatically alter our world is undeniable. It’s no longer a question of if, but when.

In fact, Forrester Research expects one in 10 startups will employ more bots than humans in just a few years as automation technologies continue to mature. At the core of many of these technologies will be AI, helping orchestrate, improve, and discover.