UiPath: RPA and AI will be commoditized productivity tools within 5 years

“In three to five years, RPA and AI will become a commodity productivity tool, the same way as you use Excel and PowerPoint,” proclaimed Boris Krumrey, chief robotics officer at UiPath, at the AI Summit in London last week.

Robotic process automation, or RPA as it’s often called, isn’t the sexiest concept to emerge from the technology sphere, but it is a fast-growing industry — and it’s one that could reshape the workplace of the future.

RPA brings automation to laborious enterprise tasks through smart “software robots” that replicate repetitive (and tedious) tasks through rules-based processes. The technology is installed on top of popular business applications, which may include enterprise resource planning (ERP) software or customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and it monitors what humans do so that it can emulate them. If you ever have to carry out manual data entry tasks for hours or days at a time, RPA could be the answer to your prayers.

Some estimates peg the RPA industry at $2.3 billion today, and it could grow to more than $4 billion by 2022. In the past year alone, some major cash injections have been put into RPA companies, including Automation Anywhere, which secured $300 million from SoftBank; Kryon, which raised $40 million; Softomotive, which nabbed $25 million; and Automation Hero, which reeled in $14.4 million.

And then a couple of months back, UiPath raised a gargantuan $568 million round of funding at a $7 billion valuation.

UiPath was founded out of Bucharest, Romania in 2005, though it was originally known as Deskover. In the beginning, it was more of a software outsourcing company that built automation libraries and SDKs for major companies such as Google and Microsoft. Armed with a new name in 2015, UiPath doubled down on RPA and moved its headquarters to New York City two years later.

With UiPath Studio, companies can access prebuilt activities and design automation processes visually through constructing diagrams, while the UiPath Orchestrator is where companies can deploy and manage all their robots and processes.

Although RPA is a fast-growing industry, these kind of productivity tools are still relatively low key — they’re not “mainstream” in the same way as Microsoft Office or Google Docs. But that is something that UiPath predicts will change in the coming years, with Krumrey outlining key steps the industry will have to go through to get to a point where automation tools such as RPA are part of the mainstream.

For RPA and automation tools to become truly commoditized, they first have to be available for everyone to use — a “robot for every employee,” as Krumrey puts it. And it’s at this point where people will start to think “how can I automate this task” before they actually start doing it. It’s about a change of mindset, where automation becomes a default consideration when doing just about anything.

Krumrey highlighted an interesting example of this, where one of its customers is meshing a UiPath robot with computer vision to watch physical mailboxes — whenever a package or letter lands in a box, the person aligned with that box receives an email.

But in theory, this could work in other scenarios, including mission-critical control rooms.