Widespread RPA Adoption Lays Groundwork For AI-Powered Enterprise Digital Assistants (EDAs)

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Beth Hampton
02/02/2021

The premise of automation is that it has the capacity to observe how work is done and replicate a workflow through a bot – a software agent that can perform the same task without any human input. Employees are thereby freed up to focus on more important work, while the chore that was automated can be performed more efficiently and with fewer errors.

The RPA market has grown exponentially over the past years. A recent Gartner report states that “the RPA software market grew 62.9% in 2019 to $1.4 billion and held its position as the fastest-growing segment in the enterprise software market for a second year.”

Data from SSON Analytics corroborates this trend: Compared with 2018, where just 9% of respondents from SSON’s annual survey said they had implemented an Intelligent Automation (IA) tool as part of their operations, 2019’s results showed this number had jumped up to 32%, with another 29% in the pilot phase.

With RPA so widely implemented, AI-powered digital assistants now present an opportunity to take the concept of automation one step further - companies can now create bots not only to automate repetitive manual tasks, but also to give their employees the ability to interact with those bots and harness them to support their own work.

Insights from the SSON IA Global Market Report 2020 clearly confirm the trend of utilizing additional IA tools – based on a global IA survey conducted in Q2 of this year, this report shows almost 4 in 10 organisations are either moving onto additional IA solutions (23%) or are now scaling (15%).

Given the widespread adoption of RPA, the groundwork has been laid for the integration of new, AI-powered tools such as EDAs. Enterprises today find themselves on the cusp of the next generation of digital transformation – with RPA as its point of entry.

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