As RPA evolves, humans will increasingly take a back seat
The robotic process automation (RPA) industry has heated up over the last year with some of the leading players — like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism — growing much faster than expected. At Transform 2019 this month, Guru Chahal, founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Lan Xuezhao, CEO of Basis Set Ventures, attributed some of this excitement to a second wave of RPA capabilities.
“What we are seeing now is that the first generation of automation has played through,” Chahal said. Now RPA is starting to make it possible to automate things that were not feasible five to 10 years ago.
For example, machine learning makes it possible to interpret images and categorize them as part of a process. “Today there are some fundamental building blocks in computer vision, in NLP understanding, in overall machine learning and deep learning, and other pieces of technology that make a much larger pool of things automatable,” he said.
These new kinds of AI capabilities are moving out of the labs and into production in a big way, and Chahal sees companies doubling down to automate more of their business. “The big change is that then it was theory; now the proof points are there. These companies aren’t just raising tons of money; they’re making tons of money.”
The first wave of RPA required process experts to understand what processes could be automated, as well as special coding skills to script the bots. This is currently where a lot of the RPA solutions are generating revenues today.
The next generation of RPA involves using automation to figure out what processes can be automated through better process discovery capabilities. For example, Lightspeed has invested in FortressIQ, which uses machine learning to interpret how employees interact with applications. This will make it easier for businesses to prioritize automations and could play a role in further accelerating the deployment of other RPA capabilities in the enterprise.
We’re at the beginning of this second phase, Chahal asserts, but a third phase is looming on the horizon. Both Chahal and Xuezhao assert that it will involve less human participation than ever.
Xuezhao drew a distinction between these early phases and the future third phase.
