Among the many tech trends fueled by big data, artificial intelligence has emerged as one of the most captivating for the market. While consumers are likely drawn to its convenience and novelty, AI’s appeal for enterprises and investors is firmly rooted in its innovation and growth potential. The global AI market is forecast to reach $153,389 million by the end of 2025 due to a rising demand for efficient data analysis and improved consumers solutions across industries.

Despite the opportunity it holds, some are still slow to adopt AI technologies due to challenges of integration. Businesses report a lack of IT infrastructure, talent and budget as the biggest barriers to adoption.

With its momentum and the promise of even greater potential on the horizon, AI is drawing attention from those who want to usher tech into a new era of automated productivity.

“The ever-increasing use of AI and machine learning integrated into enterprise solutions impacts the productivity of your people, which hopefully has great returns on both your top-line growth and bottom-line savings,” said Carl Eschenbach (pictured), partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital Operations LLC.

A technologist with a history working with industry leaders such as VMware Inc., Eschenbach is leveraging his 29 years of operating experience and putting it to work at Sequoia.

Eschenbach spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California, to discuss the future of robotic process automation, or RPA, in the enterprise.

AI acceleration

AI presents a more efficient alternative to the tedious manual labor that has so far been used to interface with data and processes — two productivity imperatives scaling at a rate that will make their successful management by humans an eventual impossibility.

“[Automating] your enterprise to move towards a digitized world drives your productivity, your people that much higher,” Eschenbach said.

As technological advancements create work that outpaces talent ability and availability, the industry is looking increasingly to RPA to bridge the skills gap. The past few years have seen a rapid acceleration around development and adoption of AI, and as the technology matures, it is quickly seeing implementation and beneficial returns in the enterprise.

“People used to try to solve this by going to offshore locations with lower-cost opportunities, but again it was all human driven. With the advent of something like RPA, that can be substituted with software and bots. That drives up the efficiency at which you’re doing everything,” Eschenbach said.

Putting automated tools at the forefront of business process outsourcing has the potential for incomparable value in accuracy and productivity of mundane repetitive tasks. “A software bot may replace three, four, five humans [and] can work 24 hours a day. The [return on investment] and value proposition around RPA is very straightforward,” Eschenbach stated.

While this justification may raise eyebrows from those wary of the economic disruption automation could bring by replacing jobs, the AI revolution stands to benefit humans in the jobs it will create, both around the development and maintenance of its own tech, as well as the innovation potential it creates by freeing people from tedious tasks.

“The humans who used to do those mundane tasks [can] work on revenue generating, profitable activities, while the software bots take care of the automation of your older legacy systems. It does more than just save cost; it actually starts to impact your topline revenue growth,” Eschenbach said.

The journey to UiPath

Sequoia is working to foster the growing ecosystem that’s starting to be established around the RPA industry by investing in enterprises searching for new use cases around automated technology. One of the firm’s latest ventures was in the most recent round of funding for UiPath Inc., an international software company now valued at $3 billion for its RPA platform.

“Today we’re solving this with humans, but if I could solve this with software, RPA, and technology like UiPath is providing, I can drive up my margins and repurpose people to do other tasks,” Eschenbach said.

Recognizing rapid momentum in the market, Sequoia surveyed the RPA landscape before ultimately landing on UiPath. The firm was attracted to the company’s strong global presence, as well as its top down commitment to customer success.

“They’re covering the three major geographies around the world even at an early stage of the company. They built a global footprint to support their global customers because of the rapid acceleration of the product. They’re getting something like six new enterprise customers a day,” Eschenbach said.

As an investment partner, Sequoia is working to expand that presence even further. “They’re in Japan, they’re across Europe, they have a new headquarters in New York, and they’re hiring rapidly,” Eschenbach added.

A rich transformation opportunity

The enterprise continues to provide new transformative opportunities as data value extraction processes are honed and implemented for use in serving a constantly evolving market.

“Both on-premise and obviously with the cloud environment, it’s not if; it’s when and how fast people ultimately move into the cloud,” Eschenbach said.

For investors like Eschenbach who built their reputation in the enterprise world, leveraging that experience lends itself to impactful partnerships and innovations like those within UiPath.

“Over the last few years, it’s been a really rich environment for an investor to think about what’s happening in the enterprise, as people still are looking for technologies to transform their business at such a rapid rate,” Eschenbach concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE