Welcome to the New Bot Economy

When you mention digital transformation, chances are you’ll encounter that look of intense fatigue. An overused, over-marketed term that every major technology vendor and enterprise uses to describe the impact of technology on business and society.

But the operative word here is transformation. 

A couple of decades ago, the use of a spreadsheet application was transformative to businesses because the piece of paper or text file that data previously resided in didn’t natively offer any ability to organize and manipulate data. The next generation of businesses however were spreadsheet-native. To them, spreadsheets were necessary but not transformative. Much like how the iPhone 3.0 was transformative in the early years following its 2007 launch but is table stakes for a digital-native teenager today. 

The point being, perception of what is transformative changes from time to time. What was once transformative later become pervasive, blending into the fabric of an increasingly technology-driven world. 

What then are the truly transformative technologies today? Blockchain? Virtual and augmented reality? Autonomous vehicles? Yes, yes and yes but an understated yet tremendously transformative technology that is much farther along in the value realization curve for enterprises today is Robotic Process Automation (RPA), amped up with cognitive capabilities. 

RPA is less about replacing humans with bots (short for software robots) than it is about refocusing the human workforce on activities that truly require human ingenuity and creativity. And RPA bots can perform repetitive tasks at 10x the speed of humans, with significantly less error. For that reason, its adoption by businesses has been growing like wildfire in recent times and will continue to do so in the coming years.

But enterprises don’t always have the resources and expertise to scale their RPA initiatives as quickly as they’d like to. And without speed, they risk losing their competitive edge. 

At Automation Anywhere, we came to the realization – from a decade and a half RPA experience – that the automation of business processes roughly follows Pareto’s law. That is, 80% of business are automating the same 20% of all business processes that can be automated. Which means that several of the same bots can be used by different businesses (with some customization) to automate very similar business processes. 

Introducing Bot Store

As innovators and leaders in the RPA market by a wide margin, we saw in this trend an opportunity to better serve our customers. That's why we launched Automation Anywhere Bot Store — an online marketplace for RPA bots that run on the Automation Anywhere Enterprise platform. 

When you’re looking to automate a process, task or activity, you can now first go to the bot store and use its intuitive search function to find out if there are prebuilt bots that meet your needs. If so, just download and plug them into your process. It’s as simple as that. 

You can search for bots by business function, vertical, process type, relevant application, cognitive ability or other attributes that make discovery as easy as using Google Search. 

With Bot Store, we’ve now pioneered a new bot economy, one that we believe will soon become a thriving marketplace where bot developers can feature their best-in-class, plug-and-play bots, and bot users can go to turbocharge their RPA initiatives.