Automation Success by Shail Khiyara

Hyper-growth is a very, very interesting phenomenon. Spending the past 3 years in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), could easily be viewed as 10 in other industries. Think the show 24: A frenzied environment and each episode was only a day of the protagonist’s reality? The RPA industry is just that. The market is firing signals on an hourly basis.

This accelerated growth is driving momentum and only adding value for customers. Alongside that, agility, speed, and experimentation is critically important to marketing and operations people in this industry.

If you were to put the RPA industry on a timeline, say where we are now, 2.5 years ago, and 1.5 years ago, then put another industry on the same parameters, the rapid development is even more clear.

Two years ago, customers still were asking, “What is RPA? How do I deploy it within my organization, and will I see value from it?” Fast forward to the present and people are asking, “What are the interesting use cases and what processes should I automate?” Customers are aware of what tasks they need, and want to connect with others on uses of RPA in their ecosystems. Its become a bigger talking point since the inception.

RPA has been adopted at a rapid rate, more than past technologies. We’re at an crossroads with how successful we’ve been in the industry and folks trying to scale. But like I was saying before, how does that compare to actual adoption of other technologies timeline wise?

While we can’t call it mass adoption yet, it’s safe to call it modest. Looking at the top 2 industry players, they have a base of 2500 unique customers, roughly. But many of these customers use a multi-vendor strategy, so they have 2500 unique customers as well.

I think, in context, we’re seeing acute awareness. People are using RPA, but customers still question, “What else is there?” They get the expedient returns on investment and low friction to deployment, which is good. But between the lines they’re asking how they can get the full benefits of RPA and scale.

So from a marketing standpoint we’re trying to increase awareness. This encompasses sharing stories and experiences. It’s at the forefront because a lot more data is now available, and the analyst community is focusing on implementing RPA, not just educating the market.

These debates are top of mind in the market today.

Looking back at the early days with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), cloud, and mobile, it was these technologies that laid the foundations. Although distinctly different in their adoption rates, cloud and cloud security paved the way for customers to be comfortable with RPA-style technologies. Certainly, there are still concerns about security with RPA. But some of the technologies and some of the underlying customer concerns that were in play with cloud and ERP have been streamlined. Questions now focus on capabilities and value versus feature functionality, which was the case with ERP in the early days.