An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
If the RPA (robotic process automation) market makes the journey from a form of automation for specialized tasks to true democratization of human-assisted automation, I’d expect UiPath to be clearing much of that pathway.
Looking at the massive uptick of the entire RPA market, and UiPath’s dominant sales and market share growth within it (moving from $60M to $360M ARR in 2 years and claiming 62% of the F500 as customers) you can see why they are considered the leaders in a new category dubbed ‘Hyperautomation’ by a big analyst firm. But let’s not break out the anointing oil so fast.
There’s still a lot of groundwork to be laid here before RPA becomes a ‘pull’ demand market, as a prior generation of BPM and automation solutions failed to clear the hump of process-specific work to become adaptable enough to survive whatever the mainstream business world could throw at them.
“RPA by itself is still task automation and doesn’t stand alone — the enterprise also needs an automation-first mindset,” said UiPath Chief Evangelist Guy Kirkwood. “We’re often seeing that the smartest individuals to build attended automation within organizations also have a gamer’s perspective.”
It’s in this skilled attended automation approach where UiPath is really driving its differentiation. Bots are managed and provisioned to the human workforce from an operational hub, sharing process mining data, compliance settings, organizational customization and improvement feedback.
But just as importantly, hundreds of thousands of workers themselves are being trained or reskilled by the company, its SI partners, and even some of its competitors on how to get the most out of these new automated co-workers.
Only through continued education across the entire market will we finally start to see RPA emerge from a rather brittle process-specific tool, to a generally democratized human-augmented practice to be applied across multiple departments of any given enterprise.
I for one, wouldn’t miss the office water-cooler co-worker banter, though, I’m sure someone could get bots to do that too.
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