24 Oct Top RPA trends 2021
This article lets you in on the top four RPA trends 2021: Learn why they can change your business and how to apply them.
Four megatrends dominate new solutions in the process automation space:
- Hyperautomation
- AI-based automation
- No-code or low code
- RPA as a Service
They each address different aspects of how a business works with process automation. The common denominator is that they each draw RPA more towards being a platform that you configure and less as an IT development tool.
Hyperautomation
Is next-generation automation that is smarter and more personalized than the current processes
AI-based automation
This could be considered a variant of Hyperautomation, but it is a pure AI-based version. This means that it learns how the user acted and performs processes that mimic their behavior.
No-code and Low-code
There is a tendency for the business units to make processes dependent on a centralized RPA department. A No-code solution lets them do so. There is a variant that requires little or simple code, called Low-code.
SAAS RPA tools
The first generation RPA tools were hosted on-premise on a dedicated server setup. There are many advantages of such a structure, but it is costly to set up and maintain. So hosted solutions are becoming more popular, as they are more accessible from a cost point.
We will now go through each of the four in more detail.
Hyper-automation
Hyperautomation is building AI-based intelligence into the RPA application. It means that the system will be able to make a decision on the best automation options.
The illustration below illustrates this principle. You can see that you are moving from a concept or a world view if you behave like you know the process outcome in advance.
People familiar with software would know this as an If-then-else scenario.
On a conceptual level, this has to do with your interpretation of knowledge.
The point is that RPA, in its simplest form, can be viewed as a data processing tool, where hyper-automation processes knowledge.
So they are at a higher level on the knowledge pyramid. And the value of what you can achieve is higher the higher you go up because you can automate more human-like tasks that are worth more from a time-saving perspective.
The knowledge pyramid is a great way of illustrating this, and you can read more in this article.
Low code or no-code
Low-code or no-code tools mean that they can be configured without code. This enables the end-users of the tool to create the automation they need without a tech developer’s dependencies.
This often means that you can have a much more decentralized way of creating your process automation.
In that way, the concept works well into an Agile organizational setup where smaller teams control how they design their business solutions.
There is a distinction between no-code and low.-code. No code means that everything is configurable, and low code implies that most are configurable, but some elements are not.
In an RPA context, the nonconfigurable parts are often the system integrations, which means that you would have to configure the system to work with your RPA tool.
Then you can build the processes in a tool that does not require additional coding.
The difference is illustrated in the two figures.
No-code RPA
No Code RPA
AI-based automation
AI-based automation can mean many different things. You can split the use of AI and RPA into three different categories:
- AI that helps you manage and create processes
- AI that helps you run your processes
- AI that expands your processes to more platforms
- The first AI part has to do with using AI to find new automation use cases and create AI processes.
The next section means that you build in AI in your processes, so that AI. That could happen in a way where AI can detect when a user is conducting a process, and then the AI will finish the process on behalf of the user.
The third part of the AI involvement means that you use bots to expand your processes. It could mean that a chatbot was integrated into your automation.
AI’s business potential
This article elaborates on AI’s general business potential.
SAAS RPA tools
SAAS means Software As A Service, in other words, Cloud solutions. The same reasons that other businesses tend to go for cloud solutions also apply in the RPA business.
Cloud customers get cheaper and always up-to-date software with a cloud solution. It is cheaper because you do not have to run and maintain the software yourself. You also get access to the newest software all the time, so no need to worry about upgrades, testing, and other such maintenance issues.
The RPA market has been limited by the requirement of locally installed servers that were used to access the system as an employee would have done. This concept conflicts with the cloud approach, so this is one of the reasons why RPA traditionally has been an on-premise solution. But there is still a tendency to deploy the core RPA functionality in the cloud.
Conclusion
So the Top RPA trends 2021 can change the way you run your business in different ways. Let us know in the comments below which one you see can benefit your business the most.
