Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a shining example of the absolute efficacy of Artificial Intelligence today. Also known as software robotics, RPA involves the creation of bots to learn, mimic and execute rule-based business processes. While automation as a concept has been around a long while, RPA is a newer but more adaptable extension of intelligent automation that is well poised to help enterprises execute largescale and repetitive tasks with minimum error. The evolution of AI has made RPA a very attractive solution for businesses today. 

RPA is expected to achieve near universal adoption by 2024, stated Deloitte, with 53% companies world over already having deployed it and 78% adopters keen on continuing to invest in the technology in the years to come. Gartner has pointed that hyper automation will be a top strategic technology trend in 2021. In this race to build and deploy bots, there are already a handful of incumbents. One of them is Automation Anywhere. Headquartered in San Jose and founded in 2003 by Mihir and Neeti Shukla, Ankur Kothari and Rushabh Parmani. Automation Anywhere has deployed more than 2.8 million bots that support some of the largest enterprises in 90 countries, including the likes of Microsoft, LinkedIn, NHS, TCS, Oracle, Pfizer, Honeywell, ANZ, Bancolombia, Dell EmC, Symantec, Emirates NBD among others. Milan Sheth, EVP (IMEA) of Automation Anywhere used to advise clients like these on expanding their use of advanced technologies, during his tenure at Ernst & Young. His transition to Automation Anywhere is what he claims "becoming a practitioner from a preacher" as he was keen to play an active part of this new wave of digital transformation in business. "The idea behind RPA is to remove the robotic nature of human interactions. Humans are meant to do much more with their time and capabilities, not get saddled with mundane tasks," he says. 

Milan Sheth, EVP (IMEA), Automation Anywhere

Building A New Digital Workforce

While basic RPA is primarily automation technology, components and capabilities akin to AI get added over a period of time. At Automation Anywhere, the focus is on developing three major skillsets for AI to address - unstructured data management, predictive outcomes, and user interface & embedded AI. These elements are captured in the company's existing RPA platform, and offered through their bots. This is how Automation Anywhere presents itself as building a "digital workforce with cognitive automation", explains Sheth. 

There are four primary bots enabling this digital workforce - the Discovery Bot allows organisations to understand automation needs and identify significant business use cases; the IQ Bot enables organistions to extract data from PDFs, emails and documents and allowing for ML models to be built using this data; Robotic Bots or AARI Bots are the smart digital assistants (they gained immense traction during COVID19) that work collaboratively with humans to simplify tasks. The Analytics Bot analyses how the bots are performing, generate insights on their performance metrics that managers can utilise to make strategic business decisions. Additionally, these bots can integrate with external applications to extract more value from primary data assets, such as tools to identify and understand grammar, language and semantics. This makes the bots more "intuitive" and "intelligent" for it seamlessly integrates across data to deliver exactly what the user needs. Across all these bot functions, there's an extensive usage of analytics, AI and ML - be it for data extraction, data mining, data processing, delivering suggestions/reparations and insights to bot managers. These bots are tasked with taking humans away from repetitive tasks, but more importantly, can effortlessly and tirelessly extract reams of data that can be valuable assets for decision makers to leverage, adds Sheth. 

COVID19 Accelerates Importance of RPA

The world as a whole came to rely heavily on technology when the pandemic began - be it facilitating remote work setups and banking on online deliveries for essential items to more crucial applications like contact tracing, rapid testing, and even drug discovery and vaccine development. In many of these functions, the role of RPA was crucial, cementing its importance as a critical technology function. For Automation Anywhere, it was a time of reckoning and a test of their expertise. As an initial response, the company launched bots to combat misinformation and deliver reliable data on the virus from official sources. In addition, a Digital Worker bot was developed to help employers understand employee health and location. But Sheth says the pandemic greatly accelerated the pace of digital adoption across the world, and Automation Anywhere was able to support their existing clients especially contact centres, healthcare and pharma companies and banks, to manage the immediate fallback of the virus and further support their navigation through the unseen challenges of 2020. Given the rapid escalation of the emergency pertaining to the virus and the urgency to move to a completely online mode of working, Sheth admits that the first few weeks of 2020 was hectic as the company was working overtime to deliver solutions to clients. Given the immense popularity of bots, more companies began resorting to them as a crucial mode of communication with customers and stakeholders alike last year. Sheth says, "Pre-pandemic, building a customised bot was a 6-8 week effort but in the early days of 2020, the expectation was to deliver these solutions in a week. Now, we've levelled to around 3 weeks, which is challenging but doable. It only goes to show that bots are becoming an important aspect for businesses, and this trend will continue strongly."

India - An Unmissable Opportunity For Expansion & Skilling

India is definitely part of this growth story. "India is the automation capital of the world. We have global capability centres and contact centres that serve the world, which are already active in the RPA sector. Meanwhile, Indian companies that are catering to the local market needs are enhancing their digital capabilities, and process automation is part of their expansion strategy; we're exploring these opportunities keenly." The company is expanding its footprint in India beyond exploring market opportunities - by making a sizeable impact in skilling. The Automation Anywhere University (AAU), started in 2017, is bringing RPA knowledge and skills to university students and professionals across all industries worldwide. To date, AAU has facilitated the completion of 1.4 million courses with developers, partners and business professionals for over 100 online RPA courses. AAU works with over 150 academic partners and has 176,000+ certifications available. Additionally, Automation Anywhere has partnered with NASSCOM's FutureSkills with a mission to upskill over two million technology professionals over the next few years.