Adoption of 'digital workers' to increase next year as prices plummet

Analyst predicts spending on Robotic Process Automation will rise XX per cent next year, driven by price decreases

Robotic process automation (RPA) is becoming increasingly popular with large enterprise organisations, causing global spend on the software to hit $680m (£524m) in 2018, according to Gartner.

This figure represents a 57 per cent year-on-year increase from 2017.

The analyst stated that those adopting the technology are companies that specialise in insurance, utilities and communications, as well as banks.

"Typically, these organisations struggle to knit together the different elements of their accounting and HR systems, and are turning to RPA solutions to automate an existing manual task or process, or automate the functionality of legacy systems," said Cathy Tornbohm, vice president at Gartner.

"End-user organisations adopt RPA technology as a quick and easy fix to automate manual tasks.

"Some employees will continue to execute mundane tasks that require them to cut, paste and change data manually. But when RPA tools perform those activities, the error margin shrinks and data quality increases."

RPA technology uses a combination of "user interface interaction describer technologies" to imitate the process a human would undertake to complete a task.

It also provides a broad range of solutions with tools to operate on individual desktops or enterprise servers.

The analyst predicts that 60 per cent of organisations with a revenue of more than $1bn will have deployed RPA tools by the end of the year.

It also estimates that by the end of 2022, 85 per cent of large and very large organisations will have deployed some form of RPA.

"The growth in adoption will be driven by average RPA prices decreasing by approximately 10 per cent to 15 per cent by 2019, but also because organisations expect to achieve better business outcomes with the technology, such as reduced costs, increased accuracy and improved compliance," said Tornbohm.

Gartner warned that for RPA to be successful to an organisation's outcomes, the company must evaluate the possible use cases for RPA and focus on how it might generate revenue for the business.

Quick wins will be imperative in encouraging adoption of the software, according to the analyst.

These can be cases where RPA delivers a high ROI, such as tasks that require people to solely move data between systems or involve structured, digitalised data processed by predefined rules.

"Do not just focus on RPA to reduce labour costs," advised Tornbohm.

"Set clear expectations of what the tools can do and how an organisation can use them to support digital transformation as part of an automation strategy."