2018 was another exciting year for Intelligent Automation with Automation Anywhere cementing their position as a major player and UiPath’s meteoric rise. The number of case studies becoming available, the diverse range of businesses and public sector organisations beginning to automate and the complementary technologies all grew rapidly. Here at VKY Intelligent Automation, we’ve loved every minute of being involved and are excited about 2019. In this short series of blogs, Alex Croucher our Director of Intelligent Automation, shares some predictions for the year ahead.
Marketing Terminology
The term Robotic Process Automation (RPA) will continue its decline to be replaced by Intelligent Automation, virtual users and just plain automation. The words Bot and Robot will go the same way. This is being driven by a number of factors:
- Software vendors want to play up their cognitive credentials
- Early adopters liked the “techy-ness” of the robot term but we’re generally past early adoption and seeing more fast followers
- Projects are increasingly sponsored, driven and delivered by operational business areas rather than technology so the capability requires a more straightforward description (how many times have people asked if there will be a little robot sitting on desks and will it require its own computer?)
Digital Assistants
This will be the buzz word of 2019. This moves the business justifications away from the automation of high volume tasks towards automating some tasks of high value staff such as revenue generators and senior management. These will be particularly common in large professional services businesses.
Blending of Automation and AI Capabilities
Intelligent Automation as a concept already includes some AI capability. This will grow quickly over the next year with more case studies becoming available of utilising both automation and image recognition, deep learning or natural language generation. Some will integrate the capabilities and others will use automation to feed data into the algorithms or using an algorithm to trigger the more straightforward automation.
Whether any of these predictions are right or wrong, 2019 will definitely be an exciting year for everyone in the world of Intelligent Automation and related technologies. What are your thoughts? Please let us know your predictions for 2019.
About VKY Automation
VKY Automation are at the forefront of Intelligent Automation technology in Scotland and are the first independent Scottish business to achieve partner status with both Automation Anywhere and UI Path – 2 of the top software vendors in the global automation market. We understand how to get the most out of the technology and how to avoid the pitfalls. Scottish tech news site digit.fyi recently described VKY as one of the leading Intelligent Automation consultancies in Scotland. To find out more about Intelligent Automation and what it can do for you, please get in touch for a confidential and no obligation chat by emailing info@vkyautomation.com
