Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been gathering huge momentum over the recent years both in terms of its significance and deployment. This new automation capability has been growing across the country in traditional industries, government systems and service sectors. It may appear that RPA is anti-workforce technology, but in reality, it is bound to create new sets of job opportunities for people. Only the budding professionals in a country of 1.3 billion need to be ready for adapting to the change before it revamps the entire job landscape.

Blue Prism (AIM: PRSM), a global leader in intelligent automation for the enterprise, recently released the latest results from their annual global survey into the digitization of the workforce. The survey reveals that 84 percent of business leaders in India see RPA as essential to helping increase workforce productivity, a situation heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic. Blue Prism has been transforming the way work is done! At Blue Prism, there are users in over 150 countries in more than 1,800 businesses, including Fortune 500 and public sector organizations, that are creating value with new ways of working, unlocking efficiencies, and returning millions of hours of work back into their businesses.

Blue Prism’s leading Robotic Operating Model (ROM) implementation methodology is proven to help users quickly identify, build, develop, and automate enterprise-grade processes at scale. Positioned as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for RPA, the company continues to push flexibility and choice for organizations through innovations like Blue Prism Digital Exchange 2.0, Decipher IDP v6.8 and Blue Prism Cloud.
The India findings are based on research conducted with 600 local knowledge workers and senior IT business leaders. These findings are part of a global research study titled ‘The Impact of a Digital Workforce on Business Agility and Survival’, which surveyed more than 6,700 knowledge workers and senior IT business leaders across 13 countries.

Post the Covid-19 pandemic, it will be essential for businesses to accelerate their digital transformations to adapt to the new economy that will be increasingly digital first. 96 percent of business leaders in India have stated that RPA will be essential in helping to achieve this, while 79 percent said that the technology will be critical for the business to remain competitive in an increasingly turbulent economic environment. In addition, 92 percent of business leaders stated that they will embrace automation by extending these capabilities throughout their organizations, and 91 percent of knowledge workers have already indicated that their employers will provide opportunities for new skills when the technologies are introduced.

Intelligent automation is more important than ever in driving business resilience and success

Compared to other markets, Indian Enterprises are still predominately using Robotic Desktop Automation (RDA) / Attended Automation to automate tasks which runs on desktops without proper controls and governance within their organization. Most of the large Indian enterprises have realized that their investments has given them either a negative or single digit RoI over three years period because of hidden costs. Hence, most of the digital transformation leaders in India are either replacing their existing automation tools with matured and secured enterprise class unattended RPA platform offering secure ‘Human in the Loop’ features or adopting a dual vendor strategy to protect their existing investments.

Presently, the Indian market is still dominated by automation vendors who started with attended automation and recently built siloed unattended features to scale themselves to become a RPA vendor. Unfortunately, both their attended and unattended features operate in silos and require huge development efforts, additional license cost and pose major migration challenges to get them to work together or upgrade from attended to unattended automation. However, 99 percent of business leaders in India have indicated that they have plans to extend their automation programmes, as 74 percent also stated that their staff still spends too much time on administrative tasks. To achieve this, business leaders in India will need to adopt enterprise grade RPA solutions that enable them to scale their automation programmer in a safe and secure way.

“Intelligent automation is more important than ever in driving business resilience and success,” says Jason Kingdon, Executive Chairman & CEO, Blue Prism. “These survey results validate how employees and business leaders alike see a digital workforce forever changing the way they work and compete. The potential of this technology is only limited by your imagination, as intelligent automation is at the centre of enabling digital transformations for large scale enterprises. Soon, organizations will consist of one-third digital workforce, one-third employees, and one-third infrastructure, as the future of work is only accelerating due to the Covid-19 pandemic”.

Peter Gartenberg, Managing Director & President – Indian Subcontinent, Blue Prism, asserts, “The results from this year’s survey clearly show that executives across India are looking to embrace the latest technologies as we rapidly shift to a digital first world that has been fast tracked by Covid-19. RPA and automation technologies will not just play an essential role in this transition, they will also enable Indian companies to revolutionize their workforces to adapt, grow and thrive in the new working world that will emerge once the pandemic subsides”.

The RPA industry across India has great scope for growth in the near future. Both education providers and companies are working towards creating the necessary knowledge pool to fulfill the industry demands.