The challenge of uptake: What’s limiting RPA’s full potential?

When a hot new business technology comes along, we see exuberant market size predictions from analysts, accompanied by heady ROI claims from vendors attempting to increase their valuation by driving customer adoption past early stages.

Despite the repeated cycle of hype, every generation sees a handful of solutions that justifiably achieve phenomenal results in the steepness of their initial adoption curve.

Take for instance virtualization, and a few years later, containerization. Both arrived on the scene and quite abruptly proliferated through enterprises, replacing conventional servers and later, consuming VMs — while offering an initial burst of infrastructure cost reduction and utility that couldn’t be passed up.

RPA (Robotic process automation) is a more recent phenomenon in the same vein. When the first generation of RPA tools came on the scene, they gained traction by capturing human-to-system manual work as replayable automated tasks handled by bots.

Since virtually every information worker could use a set of extra hands to offload non-value-add tasks and typing, quick ROI was easy to identify. The RPA software market took off like wildfire in the mid-2010s, as initial vendors in the space envisioned a combined digital and human workforce pulling together in every office.

When RPA expectations outpaced ROI

RPA can trace its lineage to many other categories of business process automation, testing, and task management tools used over the last decades. But with its first appearance still a recent memory, by any account RPA is considered one of the hottest tech growth markets going right now.

What could stop RPA’s unending ticker-tape parade of ever-increasing value, given such amazing early results? What could bend this exponential growth curve into a logarithmic one?