UiPath pushes the boundaries of robotic process automation for businesses seeking greater efficiency
Robotic process automation, or RPA for short, burst onto the corporate tech landscape a few years ago, promising to replace humans with robots or “bots,” scripts that automate human interactions. with a user interface or an application programming interface.
Despite their futuristic name, however, bots are in fact little more than simple scripts, similar to the macros familiar to Excel users or Macintosh aficionados from the 1980s.
Bots, in fact, have two basic flaws: They are brittle, and they do nothing to reduce organizations’ technical debt – and can even increase it.
Nonetheless, the RPA market has exploded. The Unicorn Among Unicorns, UiPath Inc., went public earlier this year and continues to experience spectacular growth. Obviously, the company is doing something right, despite RPA’s limitations.
To get to the bottom of this conundrum, I traveled to Las Vegas to attend UiPath’s Forward IV conference, presented by CEO Daniel Dines (pictured), to see what it was all about. Here is what I learned:
Why Customers Love UiPath
The main business benefit of RPA is improved efficiency. Employees can take advantage of robots to automate otherwise routine and repetitive tasks, allowing individuals to devote their time to more valuable and interesting work.
Calculating the ROI of these efficiencies is straightforward and typically covers more than the costs associated with implementing and operating the UiPath platform. Add morale and retention benefits to the mix, and RPA becomes a matter of course.
There are other RPA providers out there, but UiPath has rushed to the front of the pack. In part, we can attribute this success to the quality of its bots. Scripting interactions with the wide variety of user interfaces in enterprises today is a difficult problem to solve which gives UiPath a barrier to market entry.
However, interviews with several UiPath customers clarified the main reasons UiPath has been so successful: its enterprise-class sales and support, as well as support from its system integrators and supplier partners.
Today, companies that have gone beyond small-scale RPA experiments to consider larger deployments have learned first-hand that the technology is fragile and has technical debt issues. UiPath customers have no illusions that bots can crash if something changes.
The solution: full and comprehensive lifecycle support and enterprise-level governance, respectively – from both external sources and the IT organization. “Engage IT,” advised Joe Bohnert, COE Manager of Intelligent Automation at Facebook Inc. “At the end of the day, it’s technology. “
Support typically starts with UiPath and its SI partners, but in many cases it includes the creation of entirely new RPA divisions within IT organizations. UiPath’s RPA requires a team of developers, along with all the other roles needed to build and run enterprise software, including architects, testers, support and operations staff, and more. . Despite this necessary investment, customers report a solid return on investment, provided they put the right support and development resources in place.
The limits of UiPath’s RPA
The biggest limitation of UiPath’s RPA is that, despite the name, it’s really more about automating tasks than automating processes. “RPA has to happen at the task level,” explained Junaid Ahmed, vice president of finance at Applied Materials Inc. “You can’t automate everything. You need business processes to handle this.
The ambiguity over this terminology is partly to blame – after all, how many tasks do you have to string together before you have a process? However, with UiPath, automations focus on individual tasks that a person can undertake.
For example, a common automation is to pull data from one app, maybe perform a calculation, and then enter it into another app. From a human perspective, these three steps are a task, and a bot is certainly capable of accomplishing them.
In contrast, end-to-end workflows and other business processes are not at the center of RPA, at least for now. While UiPath claims that it is not looking to compete in the business process management market, it is adding long-running tasks (which you might call processes) to its repertoire and certainly talking about business process automation. ‘business.
Other challenges for UiPath relate to perception more than reality. Despite the sci-fi vibe of robots, many people are uncomfortable with the term, especially at work. Perhaps sticking to a term like “script” or “macro” would have allayed those fears.
There is also a widespread belief that automation will put people out of work. Many conversations and presentations at Forward IV aimed to dispel this myth.
In reality, automation is changing the way people work by relieving them of tedious and repetitive tasks. However, there is no reason to believe that employers are firing people as a result. Instead, employees focus on more valuable and interesting tasks, increasing their value to their business and improving morale.
Perhaps UiPath’s biggest challenge is the maturity of its product line. Its growth has overtaken the development of its products, giving it what essentially amounts to growing pains. As a result, it actively pursues the expansion of its category, both through acquisitions and through organic growth.
The future of RPA
Today, robots can automate tasks, but humans generally have to create the robots manually.
There are of course shortcuts – for example, a developer can record user actions as they navigate different screens. UiPath’s low-code bot-building capabilities are also a critical enabler that speeds up and simplifies bot creation.
However, what organizations really want is an automated way to create the automations – a goal that won’t become a reality until the science of artificial intelligence matures.
Ideally, a business user would only have to express the intention of the automation, and the AI-based automation routine would build it automatically.
UiPath has rudimentary AI capabilities, such as text-based sentiment analysis and entity extraction. Today’s AI, however, is nowhere near smart enough to create the automations themselves.
Such a sophisticated ability to “automate automation” would also potentially solve RPA’s fragility issues. UiPath is also working on this issue, implementing resiliency in its bots that can address infrastructure issues – the first step in implementing full bot self-healing capabilities.
However, it would take a more sophisticated AI than what we have today to be able to update bots when requirements change, or when vendors update application functionality, or when data formats or schemas change. .
We also need to look to the future to see a world where automation can directly drive digital transformation. Today, automation can transform processes and roles within an organization, what we call digitization. Digital transformation, on the other hand, is transforming the business and its strategy. (See my 2018 article where I explain the difference.)
Many of Forward IV’s customers were certainly in the middle of their digital transformation journey – and automation was unquestionably a catalyst for such a transformation (or they probably wouldn’t have attended the conference).
Indeed, transforming processes and roles – digitization – can lead to greater efficiency and better morale, which in turn frees people to work on digital transformation efforts. Today, however, don’t expect your bots to digitally transform your organization.
Jason Bloomberg is founder and president of Intellyx, which advises business leaders and technology providers on their digital transformation strategies. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. None of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. UiPath covered most of Bloomberg’s expenses at Forward IV, an industry standard practice.