The use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is expanding rapidly across industries, geographies, and organizational sizes, with organizations chasing benefits including cost reduction, operations optimization, improved customer experience, fewer errors, easier management and control, and quick implementation and ROI. That’s driving increasing RPA spending: Gartner projects spending on RPA software to hit $1.3 billion this year, and Forrester forecasts a $2.9 billion RPA software market in 2021.
RPA is not on its own an intelligent solution. As Everest Group explains in its RPA primer, “RPA is a deterministic solution, the outcome of which is known; used mostly for transactional activities and standardized processes.” Some common RPA use cases include order processing, financial report generation, IT support, and data aggregation and reconciliation.