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Robotic process automation (RPA) — tech that tasks intelligent agents with performing repetitive, often monotonous office chores usually undertaken by human workers — is a red-hot sector.

A conversation about RPA and its business impact with Automation Anywhere Co-Founder Neeti Mehta Shukla.

Companies can either dig their heels in and be left behind, or they can invest in upskilling their employees for the jobs of the future, writes Adrian Jones of Automation Anywhere.

When the subjects of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are raised, many people react with feelings of suspicion and even fear… A study – called The Augmented Human Enterprise, by Goldsmiths, University of London for robotic process automation company Automation Anywhere – is more optimistic.

Far from being the death knell for traditional jobs, AI could actually prove to make your work life better, new research has found.

San Jose-based Automation Anywhere, one of the top five global leaders in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for enterprises, is on an expansion mode to tap the growing opportunity for automation.

Businesses that make human workforce development a key part of their adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will achieve more significant profits than those that don’t.

Automation arrived long back in India and the country is now driving Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based technologies globally -- even ahead of the US and Japan -- a new study said.

Watch the interview here.

Automation Anywhere, a San Jose, California-based robotic process automation (RPA) startup, today announced that it has raised $250 million in a funding round led by New Enterprise Associates and Goldman Sachs.

It appears that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and New Enterprise Associates see a lot of growth potential in the emerging field of robotic process automation. The two firms were today named as the lead investors in a $250 million round into Automation Anywhere Inc., one of this segment’s biggest players.

An increasing number of enterprises are considering the adoption of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine IT that can expedite and make more efficient the execution of routine tasks. Abhijit Kakhandiki, Senior Vice President of Products and Engineering at Automation Anywhere, recently offered eWEEK his take on all this.

Enterprise processing needs have skyrocketed due to the increase in data surging from cloud and “internet of things” devices, and manual operations are no longer enough to fulfill the needs of such rapidly evolving compute networks. To help reduce friction and enable continued innovation, enterprises are looking to the power of automation and artificial intelligence to bolster existing manpower.

America is getting older. The Administration on Aging estimates that the United States population, age 60 or older, will increase to 22.2 percent in 2020. This change — driven by increased longevity and the demographic bulge of the baby boom — represents the biggest percentage point increase in the over-60 population that America has ever seen. But, what does this mean from an employment stand point?

America is getting older. The Administration on Aging estimates that the United States population, age 60 or older, will increase to 22.2 percent in 2020. This change — driven by increased longevity and the demographic bulge of the baby boom — represents the biggest percentage point increase in the over-60 population that America has ever seen. But, what does this mean from an employment stand point?

Automation Anywhere chief executive Mihir Shukla on a visit to London last week talked enticingly of the brave new world that would be created through a “digital workforce” of robots and humans working together so that the robots did the mundane tasks, such as data processing and basic analysis, leaving humans free to spend more time on matters requiring judgement and experience.

Automation Anywhere CEO Mihir Shukla appears on the NBC technology show “Press:Here.” Watch the interview here.

Thirdware has teamed up with Automation Anywhere of San Jose, Calif. to bring that company’s robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities to the auto industry. RPA would add context-aware software bots to systems to help automate the organization and processing of all manner of data required to keep a business humming along including invoicing, parts ordering and sequencing and electronic payments.

With the world aggressively embracing newer forms of technology, many of the existing job profiles are at stake. People are a little unsettled over this fact and believe that, within the next decade, a lot of jobs will become obsolete. In reality, they’ll vanish to the tune of over 100 million by 2025, according to recent McKinsey reports. Isn’t that a very frightening figure? In light of information like that, I can’t help but wonder what will the jobs of the future be like? What will we be doing? What will our kids be doing? But then again, before we think forward, let’s go back in time.

We live in exciting times of unprecedented progress. Automation has a significant role in propelling human advancement and digital transformation is the new status quo. RPA, AI and cognitive machine learning technologies are in the real-world hands of business leaders as they command a new digital workforce. But as we cut costs and focus on error-free transactions, new service models, etc., there are human workforces — our people — to consider.

Automation has become an integral component of digital transformation strategies for enterprises around the world. Specifically, today robotic process automation (RPA) is the technology of choice to streamline business operations and reduce costs. But how do you judge whether your RPA initiative is successful? It’s not just whether the first “go live” instance does well. It’s about building momentum with strategically selected RPA projects so you continuously automate more and more complex business processes, and achieve a sustainable—and ever-increasing—ROI. To realize this kind of success, you should follow these 8 critical best practices that leading companies have learned from their RPA deployments.

Somewhere in the NASA Shared Services Center at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, George Washington is hard at work. George Washington is precisely the type of team-player employee you’d want on your HR or finance staff — adept at doing rote, repetitive work quickly and consistently and never complains. George Washington is a bot.

A new partnership between IBM and Automation Anywhere, announced via press release, will offer integrations of the two companies' technologies to more effectively automate data-intensive business processes.

As enterprises become more comfortable with RPA bots in general and cognitive-powered bots in particular, they will be willing to try them out in more and more business processes.

Software bots can successfully automate routine and repetitive tasks to increase business productivity, but on their own, are unable to provide depth or insight into what tasks are actually being performed. Using the latest in machine learning, robotic process automation is breathing new life into bot capabilities and opening up new doors for enhanced business productivity.

Today, Automation Anywhere delivers the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise-grade RPA platform with built-in cognitive capabilities and embedded analytics. Over 500 of the world's largest enterprises use the platform to manage and scale their business processes faster, with near-zero error rates, while dramatically reducing operational costs.

CEO Mihir Shukla refers to the company’s mission as building a global “digital workforce.” He says Automation Anywhere has deployed 450,000 bots to date and is aiming to have 3 million placed by 2020. That kind of growth augurs a potential transformation for companies’ decisions on where to locate operations. “The interesting thing about the digital workforce is that it’s geography-neutral—once it happens anywhere, it can happen everywhere,” Shukla tells CFO.

Today, I built a web crawler that auto-populates a spreadsheet with stock prices. It wasn’t very advanced: It pulled a few companies’ quotes from CNNMoney and funneled them into an Excel file, along with time stamps. But it was the first bot I’ve ever made, and I did it in under an hour with almost nonexistent coding experience.

"Shukla anticipates employing a “digital workforce” of 3 million such bots, already used by companies such as AT&T and ANZ Banking Group, by 2020. That, he declares “in a manner of speaking” could make the company the world’s largest employer, somewhat like Uber Technologies Inc. could be seen as the world’s largest taxi company even without owning taxis or employing drivers."

"Shukla of Automation Anywhere offered an even rosier outlook for back-office workers. ‘The workforce will change and skills requirements will shift,’ he says. ‘Our customers tell us they’re seeing sighs of relief from employees, who hate the mundane tasks they have had to do over and over. Imagine human employees metaphorically working next to software bots. When the humans have something that must be done repeatedly, they hand it off to a bot.’"

"RPA provides you with a very simple way to automate a lot of transactions that humans are doing today so that bots can take them over,” said Abhijit Kakhandiki, vice president of products at RPA-platform provider Automation Anywhere. “Humans can act more as supervisors to those bots and do higher value things."

"Automation is a continuum and we have designed a platform that allows you to automate a single process, a part of a complex process, or an entire complex process,” says Khiyara. “We are seeing a high demand for robotic process automation that leads to the creation of a digital workforce."

"The executive runs an internal shared services offering for her company and has supervised an RPA pilot using Automation Anywhere on two processes – employee onboarding and vendor reconciliation – and will have five processes go live in the next month or so."

“Automation Anywhere has 300 hundred employees in 10 offices worldwide. Mihir’s goal is to become one the world’s largest employers without having any employees. How will they accomplish this? Projections show in the next four years, Automation Anywhere will reach 3 Million software bots worldwide which are producing at the capacity of 3 Million people.”

"Automation Anywhere will be rewarded in the marketplace by greater share and profitability. More importantly its customers will benefit because they can buy what they want, when they want it, without stranding large amounts of capital on tools that they only use part of the time. Automation Anywhere’s model is an extremely important development in the marketplace, and it’s good to see that a major automation provider has moved to attack the constraints."

"In this PoV, HfS examines two different models for deploying Automation Anywhere's RPA technology at scale within an advanced and successful SSC/GBS environment as identified after site visits with the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) in Bangalore and AT&T in Dallas.​"

“Accenture and Automation Anywhere are working together to deliver enterprise-grade RPA solutions to organizations that automate business processes, enabling operations to be scaled faster and more cost-effectively, while increasing performance accuracy.”

“Shukla said 16 of the largest 20 IT service providers partner with the company and its RPA software...The company's channel partners, he said, are taking RPA to "an industrial scale," training thousands of employees on the technology. But while RPA is most prevalent among large companies, Shukla said the software robots will move downstream to smaller service providers and eventually become a consumer technology.”

"Automation Anywhere’s BotFarms is exactly the type of innovation in RPA that both enterprises and service providers need to allow the industry to better harvest the opportunity that Intelligent Automation brings to process delivery as the market moves out of old legacy models and into the As-a-Service world."

“Mihir Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere, said software robots and human workers will form partnerships over time, likening the link-up to familiar human-machine partnerships such as construction workers operating heavy equipment on a building site. ‘This will become natural in the workplace," he said. "One day … we will have a robot as a partner.’”

According to Automation Anywhere customer AT&T "Using these bots for manual activity, we can improve cycle time for customers and get service to them faster." Read the full story on AT&T’s RPA journey here.

"Yet, this new digital workforce is creating a tectonic shift in the outsourcing world...Not only are companies like IPsoft, IBM Watson and Automation Anywhere providing the core technologies for cognitive automation, many of the world’s largest outsourcers like Wipro and TCS have introduced their own cognitive platforms which are poised to transform the labor-centric offshore services landscape to one that resides in the cloud."

"The deal will see Automation Anywhere providing an industry-leading RPA platform as well as business operations, analytics and industry expertise to EXL."

"It is a new area in the business tech space and relatively small tech companies are winning contracts with big companies eager to tap into the space. ANZ is primarily working with growing US players OpenSpan and Automation Anywhere, but many of the biggest Indian and US outsourcing vendors are scrambling to incorporate RPA into their offerings."

Robotic Process Automation automates complex tasks usually performed by white collar workers. Mihir Shukla is CEO of Automation Anywhere, one of the largest RPA players in the world, and he says it will make us more human and could bring about the next industrial revolution. Here's why.

The performance gains aren’t tenfold, though they often yield 30 or 40 percent improvements in the cost and time to perform a process. A set of case studies compiled by process automation vendor Automation Anywhere suggests that this level of improvement is typical.

"'In the short term, automation does reduce the number of available jobs,' said Mihir Shukla, chief executive of Automation Anywhere Inc., of San Jose, Calif., which creates software for companies that use automation in their front and back offices. But, in the long run, software can help businesses operate more effectively. 'If you think like a human, there are only certain things you can do. When you think like a robot, many things are possible.'"