Intelligent Automation (IA), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have all revolutionized how businesses work across industries. Today, businesses continue to deploy intelligent automation technologies within their operations to improve operational efficiency, customer and staff advocacy, and ROI. These technologies are widely used across industries, and their usage is expected to rise manifold in the coming years.
What do I see happening within the Intelligent Automation and RPA markets?
- Intelligent Automation and RPA vendors will continue to develop their platform offerings. Bot orchestration, workflow orchestration, and business workflow management are needed to orchestrate bots, AI, and other automation technologies to enable companies to further scale their automation programs.
- Pricing Challenges. Vendors who charge on a per-license model will come under pressure as they must be more creative when it comes to their pricing models as customers will become increasingly frustrated paying for both licenses they don't use or are massively underutilizing. Businesses, stretched by recession and the rising cost of staff and materials will look to tie license cost with actual license usage.
- Downsizing. Several well-known IA / RPA vendors will dramatically cut their size of operations or sell to larger rivals as they struggle to build profitable, scale businesses on bot license sales alone.
- Stepping up to the pressure. Large software vendors will double down and build automation capabilities into their software offerings to help their customers achieve more, faster, and more efficiently than before. Software vendors need to be seen to deliver more value than before and automation will help them do that.
- Outcome-based models will be a preferred way for companies to deal with service providers. When you pay for electricity, you get electricity. But the same cannot be said for automation service providers. For too many years customers have been promised returns that have not materialized. Businesses will increasingly insist service providers share risk and will tie payments to business outcomes.
- Adaptation to survive. The growth in IOT devices will force more companies to employ intelligent automation technologies to connect disparate IOT systems together to help businesses make better decisions.
- Technology Reluctance. There will be a spike in interest in generative AI but companies, already struggling to understand conversational AI, will not invest heavily in this technology until the ROI is very clear
- Market Necessity. Customers will demand more, better and faster customer service despite businesses' economic challenges because they know technology solutions are available to intelligently answer their questions 24/7. Businesses will respond using IA, RPA, or AI or face becoming irrelevant in customers' eyes. Hyper automation technologies will continue to dominate IT budgets.
As business headcounts shrink, existing staff will demand more intelligent technologies to help them absorb the additional workload due to business growth or be left behind by colleagues who have been made redundant.
Businesses will provide low code / no code drag-and-drop automation and analytics technologies to retain and intelligently disseminate knowledge in order to help staff survive and thrive. The economic uncertainty coming in 2023 will lead organizations to focus spending more carefully on technologies that deliver operational efficiency and ROI.
As a result, 2023 will see the adoption rate for intelligent automation rise as a way for businesses to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. By leveraging a combination of intelligent technologies (e.g., IA, AI, ML, RPA, BPM, etc.) businesses will drive greater operational efficiency, save labor time and cost, and deliver a great experience to customers and employees that results in a positive ROI. The alternative is digital irrelevance and market exit, and no business wants that.
How about you, what are your RPA and IA market predictions for 2023?
Originally posted in the IRPA AI Network — Intelligent Automation