- Robot Process Automation (RPA) can be used for automation of both labor-intensive customer-facing processes as well as back-end processes
- Adoption of RPA will continue to grow rapidly as COVID-19-hit industries such as manufacturing
COVID-19 is serving as an inflection point for digital transformation across industries, with RPA playing a pivotal role in ‘flattening the curve.’ With enforced lockdowns and consequent shut down of operations across industries, a greater reliance on enabling digital operations has been established.
This, as per a report by Zinnov, has led to an enhanced focus on the automation of both customer-facing processes as well as back-end processes that are labor-intensive. RPA has and will continue to play a major role in automating a bulk of these processes, enabling business continuity that will be applicable in the long term.
The global RPA market and trends
The Hyper Intelligent Automation (HIA) spend by enterprises is expected to grow by a CAGR of 55 per cent through 2025 and touch a staggering USD 42 Billion. Large enterprises continue to dominate HIA adoption (account for >70 per cent of all HIA investments) and 75 per cent of Fortune 250 customers have already made significant early-stage commitments towards HIA.
Zinnov’s report also points out towards adoption of RPA. It states that RPA automation is and will continue to grow rapidly as COVID-19-hit industries such as BFSI, travel & hospitality, and manufacturing embrace HIA to ensure business continuity planning.
Newer RPA use cases are percolating across industries to combat COVID-19. Zinnov has identified ~50 newer use cases across industries such as Healthcare, Travel & Hospitality, BFSI, and essential Retail. Enterprises are increasingly looking at adopting Intelligent/Cognitive Automation that leverages Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques to handle unstructured data and automate tasks with humanoid decision-making.
Sidhant Rastogi, managing partner, Zinnov, said, “The value that RPA/Automation can unlock for enterprises on the other side of COVID-19 is gargantuan. This pandemic has forced enterprises to leapfrog their automation journeys as they think beyond the present and future-proof their technology estates. Newer use cases are percolating across industry verticals such as BFSI, Healthcare, Business Process Management (BPM), Retail, etc., and is indicative of the fact that enterprises are channelizing their automation journeys in favor of scaling.”
He continued, “This unprecedented growth in this segment has led Service Providers to invest in industry-specific RPA capabilities and platform partnerships to partake in enterprise automation-led transformative journeys.”
