Section of this article translated from SiliconANGLE R · Danes article
Although in recent months the news was not one hundred percent touted RPA, but it also did not disclose too much information. According to the latest statistics Gartner Inc., which remains the world's fastest growing enterprise software field. In June this year, Gartner released research report, RPA revenue growth of 63.1% in 2018 to $ 846 million by 2020 will reach $ 1.3 billion.
However, many people still do not know what can be achieved in your own company. They might see the price valuation of a supplier, or read an article about alternative artificial, but they do not know in life RPA robot, the day in the end what happened.
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Few people know the true state of the RPA
Supporters tell us, RPA robot will eventually be ubiquitous, they will change the nature of the work, it is bringing the fourth industrial revolution. Co-founder and chief executive of RPA market unicorn business UiPath Inc.'s Daniel Dines once said, every PC will have a robot, just like the famous prediction • Bill Gates as Microsoft, everyone's on the table We will have a personal computer.
The robot may be able to perform some of the more complex tasks. If the employee finds himself one day 60% of the work can allow the robot to complete, what will happen? However, it is quite dramatic, RPA before substitute people, RPA company's employees are facing the problem of unemployment.
In October this year, UiPath laid off about 400 employees, about 11% of its workforce. Just a few months ago, the company received a D round of financing of $ 568 million, and its valuation soared to 70 billion dollars. To this end, it was questioned whether UiPath in defrauding investors of money.
Phil Fersht HFS Research founder and CEO, said: "Intelligent Automation is a marathon, not a sprint, UiPath excessive publicity to the RPA allowed to pay the price."
Insiders, UiPath CFO Marie Myers is also about to leave, there were reports that she was opposed to the company's reckless spending. However, from the point of view of the actual operating conditions UiPath, outside rumors do not seem to hold water. UiPath the number of customers grew from 100 in 2016 to more than 5,000 in 2019. The company's 2017 revenue of $ 15.7 million, is expected to January next year, the annual revenue will reach $ 300 million.
In addition, UiPath insisted the cuts does not mean that companies in trouble, but once optimized the company's revenue to grow rapidly. At the same time, CEO Dines also rejected the Son of $ 1 billion investment.
So the true face of the current RPA in the end is happy or worry? It does not seem conclusive. Anything, people's awareness of their must have a gradual process.
Supporters argue that the popularity of the RPA will partially liberated from the drudgery out of repetitive, opponents argue that RPA bound to make massive layoffs of some unscrupulous companies, giving rise to social problems. Someday we'll know the results of RPA brings what. For now, most people really do not understand the real situation of the RPA.
RPA our domestic industry practitioners who has been worried about price competition, products and services varies greatly, seeing a sunrise industry, it is imperative to become the Red Sea market.
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Scene Intelligent application of AI software
60 percent spend at least six hours a week doing repetitive work. Chevron is responsible for the delivery of financial information technology manager Richard Fong said recently: "Believe it or not, we still have a lot of people open e-mail attachments that's their job day they process the data two weeks before. spend another two weeks to correct the error. "
Some companies have low-skill tasks to robots, and achieved satisfactory results. For example, using UiPath platform, Chevron developed a robot that can access e-mail, open attachments, copy and paste the data into the flat file. Finally, the file is uploaded to the enterprise resource planning system.
Richard Fong said, "This is a huge win for us."
RPA appears likely to let employees work four days a week as long as, or employees every day to sleep 60-90 minutes, it should be the company's warm welcome. And plenty of time to rest so that employees can be more creative work, which in itself can increase employee productivity.
Companies eager to find out all the RPA can do to reduce costs to improve profits. 2018 "Deloitte global survey RPA" 53% of companies have begun to use some form of RPA robots. They are less than 12 months to recover the investment, average returns of 20%. But only 3% of companies can be extended to more than 50 robots.
Process development and maintenance may be barriers to the delivery of applications and extensions robot. Some people think that artificial intelligence is to solve the answer to this question, RPA robot and perhaps the future will also learn their own to fix the problem themselves.
In fact, RPA is a limited form of execution AI rule-based action, it seems that not many people now have the ideal kind of self-learning, independent decision-making, self-maintenance capabilities of high-end robots. Whether combining the two will produce a super robot has greater potential applications and less supervision needs?
James Kobielus research director and principal analyst Futurum Research indicates: "AI a few years ago in an indispensable function to enter the field of RPA, this is nothing new."
RPA AI abstraction layer using the robot program codes automatically deduced from a screenshot applications such elements. RPA vendors are now integrating more advanced AI, such as computer vision and sentiment analysis.
According to Kobielus to say, as the RPA mature markets, its products will become more complex AI.
"However, RPA has code intelligence at low process automation has made considerable achievements, and provides a case study of a powerful user-friendly tools to automate tasks .RPA suppliers and media coverage for the average developer, fully proved and the potential value of this technology. "
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RPA weakness
Analyst Jason Bloomberg on the "Forbes" magazine wrote that the AI does not address the main weaknesses of the RPA, the robustness of the poor. Strict, rule-based automation does not like change. If the user interface, a change almost any aspect of the data or applications, the robot can not be adjusted. Cognitive RPA (Cognitive RPA) may be in natural language processing, with the help of machine learning, etc., automatically make some judgments. It's in pre-programmed environment, it may appear smarter. But even the application of NLP, the machine learning, RPA is still fragile, changes in the IT environment unprepared. Frequent changes of state, agile cloud, container, micro service is its direction.
OutSystems company's solutions architect Keith L. Murphy said: "If you have a large legacy applications, as part of the process and functioning properly, there is no bug, no new features, and does not require the development of additional applications to support process, then you should consider using the RPA. "
Banks often integrated with legacy systems and applications, which is why they are considered the best application RPA industry. According to information Auxis LLC chart shows that 60 kinds of common business processes is very suitable for RPA. They are distributed in various tissues from finance to IT, including payroll processing, tax filing, employee entry and exit, data aggregation and migration, competitor pricing.
Antti Karjalainen Robocorp Technologies founder and CEO, said, "The current model of proprietary tools require companies to select from a list of preset automation, our goal is to enable developers to build their own solutions, and with the global developer RPA and enthusiasts to share these tools. "
Last month, Robocorp received a $ 5.6 million seed investment. The San Francisco start-up company claims and Finland RPA will develop and build the first cloud orchestration native, open source, license-free platform. It is believed that open ecosystem will make a contribution to the RPA, just like GitHub software development collaboration made.
According to Karjalainen said, Robocorp is to let companies of all sizes can afford customized RPA. Early users of a bank Robocorp use open source tools to automate a customer service tasks. Karjalainen pointed out that in a month it saves customers accumulated nearly 14 years of waiting time.
"The bank will never be able to prove the reasonableness of the implementation of the traditional tools of the RPA. RPA but using open source technology, it is possible."
Robocorp believe that in future, the usual outsourcing work will be handed over to robots and developers supervisors. This prospect presents a considerable problem: how these work from overseas to low-wage workers in the robot body, thus affecting the world economy?
Those companies have enough time to develop the RPA how to do? Are they robots are everyday cost savings, and stimulate creativity? Employees like robots and desking it? According to Feng said that Chevron, in the past often open the attachment the staff has been converted to a different role.
"We have ...... avoid costs because the project we do not need to hire new employees or hiring a contractor, but they can be redeployed to higher value." He said.
Some jobs are simple, but indispensable repeat, these jobs so that employees are not growing, but also allow the company to pay a lot of costs.
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RPA can do to prove himself in 2020?
Looking RPA application scenarios may be the best place to RPA provider's own office. How, even called RPA omnipotent company's own internal RPA are not widely used in finance, HR, sales and other areas, how to prove the value of RPA to the outside world.
Max Mancini, executive vice president for digital ecosystems staff said he is building a robot to coordinate energy energy credit report he received from the power company Pacific Gas and his solar submitted by the supplier. He said: "There is a lot of data from two different sources, an automated software robots can easily extract the data, comparing and validating data, and then write a summary Excel spreadsheet."
ServiceNow does not offer RPA. However, it does provide the relevant type of automation, such as IT Process Automation (ITPA), which uses API rather than the user interface. The company said that by using internal automation technology, which provided a benefit beyond cost savings. For example, apply for a software patent directive and the need to manage a variety of time-consuming task. ServiceNow's chief information officer Chris Bedi said after automate these processes, they consume resources transferred to an innovative, high-value end of the chain.
Bedi said: "We see the number of patent applications engineer proposed an increase of 83%.
Robot improve efficiency and employee satisfaction, human, thereby increasing productivity. This will undoubtedly lead to transfer workers to the role and position of each company to use the RPA. To ensure that no one is left behind, and re-skill training and skills are key to our focus in 2020. However, we do not think hiring and cut cycle best practices. "
RPA robot, whether it is working to bring the world revolution? Or is it just a vulnerable software tool? (Agile companies can not pursue the application) open source cloud platform native and artificial intelligence may also threaten the RPA. 2020 depends largely on whether or not someone can come up with some cool this robot can do.
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