Automation Now & Next 2022 Is Here

The pandemic. Ongoing trade and supply chain issues. The Great Resignation. All those issues and more have disrupted operations for businesses across industries and the globe.

It’s time to rethink and transform operations to meet the challenges, improve continuity, increase efficiencies, and drive growth. How? With intelligent automation, making it a foundational technology for running core business operations. And our Automation Now & Next 2022 report can be your guide.

 
At a tipping point for intelligent automation

Automation Now & Now 2022 provides research and insights on how enterprises are using intelligent automation to respond to today's changing business climate as well as how to prepare for the future of work, including human and Digital Worker collaboration. Based on a survey of more than 1,000 automation leaders around the globe along with more than 3,800 Automation Anywhere customers, the report is an invaluable resource to help corporate executives benchmark their businesses against the top performers across industries. It offers technology champions information and advice to build their thought leadership status for accelerating automation. And it can give business leaders the confidence and direction to successfully sustain and grow their operations with intelligent automation.

 
Highlights of the report—what’s happening now

Deploying intelligent automation is now considered essential for ongoing success. In fact, 95% of survey respondents see the technology as a key component of their transformation strategies. And that’s demonstrated by the greater-than-expected increase in the technology’s deployment during 2022 over 2021—with enhanced benefits for companies deploying intelligent automation. Following are some examples from the report on today’s trends.

Accelerating automation to mitigate the impact of global events

From the report, “organizations [have] accelerated their automation plans to better manage the business challenges. A full 94% of respondents say automation is helping address supply chain issues, and 61% strongly agree automation has helped address staffing shortages. This is enabling businesses to continue delivering great customer experiences amid ongoing disruption.”

More active scaling

Fifty-six percent of survey respondents state they are actively scaling automation across their enterprise—more than double the percentage in 2021. What’s more, the number of Digital Workers, or “bots,” has dramatically increased. In 2021, only 11% of respondents expected to have deployed 300 or more bots by the end of 2022. Now, 29% have successfully moved that many bots into production.

Higher ROI

According to the report, “Organizations are reaping phenomenal returns on their automation investments, both from a financial perspective, as well as from ‘softer’ measures such as work time saved, overall productivity, and quality.” The average ROI on automation investments has been 6.3x, more than double the amount over 2021. For the top-performing organizations, those that have outpaced their peers in meeting challenges and improving operations, the average ROI has been 8.5x.

Cloud-first is first

Cloud-based technologies are essential to delivering speed to scale, continuous agility and flexibility, and lower total cost of ownership, as well as helping companies respond to rapidly changing security and compliance requirements. Companies are moving to the cloud faster than expected, with only 7% of respondents stating that they prefer to deploy new bots on-premises. And pure cloud implementations surpass hybrid (cloud/on-premises) ones.

 
What happens next?

Intelligent automation is the future of work, as indicated by the steps companies are taking to integrate and utilize the technology throughout their enterprises, including:

Increasing budgets

Seventy-seven percent of respondents will increase their automation budgets in the next 12 months, with 24% stating they’re increasing funding by 25% or more.

Cloud migrations on the rise

Ninety-two percent have begun migrating existing automation implementations to the cloud, while 93% have adopted a cloud-first approach for new implementations. 

More support for citizen development 

Eighty-four percent of respondents support the idea of citizen developers, with 37% saying that training citizen developers is a top priority to move ahead on expanding automation throughout an organization.

 
All the insights, best practices, trends, and recommendations

Read Automation Now & Next 2022 and go deeper into the current state of intelligent automation and its benefits, along with what the future holds. You can learn about:

• The most common challenges companies have been facing and how intelligent automation can help
• What top performers are doing right—the characteristics that set the leaders apart and allow them to achieve outstanding results 
• Top business benefits and overall results achieved (per bot implementation) with intelligent automation
• Industries that report averaging more than 7x ROI on automation investments
• What executive leadership sees as the key to successfully scaling intelligent automation

And much more. Get the information and advice you can use today to help your organization overcome your challenges and make the most of an intelligent automation investment for business success.