Robotic process automation company Automation Anywhere Inc. is beefing up its platform today with a new Discovery Bot tool that can identify and automate more business processes for enterprises.

Automation Anywhere is a heavily funded startup that has emerged as one of the early leaders in the red-hot RPA market. RPA is gaining traction because enterprises can reap massive benefits by speeding up mundane business processes, freeing up workers to focus on more pressing tasks.

The company is chasing what analysts believe is a massive opportunity in RPA, with SiliconANGLE’s sister research firm Wikibon forecasting that the total market capitalization for RPA software could be worth as much as $75 billion by 2025. But although there’s a huge pot of gold up for grabs, it might not be big enough for everyone: Wikibon warns that RPA is still likely to be a winner-take-all market with room for a couple of players at best.

Automation Anywhere’s namesake platform uses machine learning to handle repetitive tasks that are normally performed by human workers. The software observes how employees carry out a given action, such as filling a form in a back-office accounting system, and then learns to replicate the workflow automatically.

The new Automation Anywhere Discovery Bot builds on this by capturing and analyzing employees’ actions to identify the most common and repetitive process steps as they navigate among the various business applications they use. It then prioritizes automation opportunities it finds according to the potential return on investment they offer, before creating new RPA bots to automate those tasks.

That should be useful because Automation Anywhere says its research shows that as many as 80% of manual, repetitive front- and back-office tasks that could be automated are as yet undiscovered. Moreover, it says that existing methods of discovering new business processes are still too slow and time-consuming and that the potential return on investment for these opportunities is uncertain.

“A lot of time is typically spent in manually understanding and documenting the as-is processes and activities. Consequently, identifying the right automation use cases is one of the key challenges that enterprises face, especially when trying to scale-up adoption,” said Amardeep Modi, Practice Director at Everest Group. “The process discovery solution from Automation Anywhere could potentially help enterprises automatically discover automation opportunities and accelerate their automation journey.”

Automation Anywhere said the new Discovery Bot is available now to early-access customers, with general availability to come later in the year.

Photo: Automation Anywhere