Robotic process automation is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the enterprise software market. Global research firm Gartner Inc. reported RPA market growth of 63% year over year, with reported revenue of $846 million in 2018. Driving this advance is the demand from businesses realizing the benefits of assigning robots the monotonous duties that eat up man hours and turn employees into glazed-eyed automations.

“We are taking the robot out of humans,” said Riadh Dridi (pictured), chief marketing officer of Automation Anywhere Inc. “[RPA] allows businesses to deploy software robots to business processes … that humans should not be doing.”

Dridi joined Donald Klein, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s Palo Alto studio for a CUBE Conversation on robotic process automation.

RPA eliminates process inefficiencies

Data entry and administrative tasks, such as opening files, reading documents, cutting and pasting, filling out forms, and loading data into systems, take a toll on employee efficiency. This all equates to money spent on time that workers could be using for more important (and rewarding) tasks.

“When you look at the average enterprises, only 20% of the steps that should be automated are automated,” Dridi said. That leaves 80% of these repetitive tasks still done by humans and a huge opportunity for RPA to step in and close the gap.

But old habits — and ingrained processes — are hard to break, and for many companies the hard part is identifying where RPA can be implemented.

Turns out, there’s a robot to help with that as well. Enter Discovery Bot, Automation Anywhere’s intelligent tool that automates the process of robotic automation.

Discovery Bot analyzes the steps a worker is taking in order to accomplish tasks and maps the process to identify repetitive points in the flow that can be automated. But it doesn’t stop there. Discovery Bot actually creates bots itself to automate the processes it has identified as wasteful of human time and energy.

“We’re the only provider today that can analyze processes with the tool and then create the bots automatically,” Dridi said. This reduces the time for process automation end-to-end, increasing efficiency and upping ROI, he added.

Intelligent bots are like humans, but better

RPA was named because robots were taking the place of humans in the “mundane, repetitive tasks that humans do as part of the end-to-end process,” according to Dridi. As the bots become more advanced, the array of tasks that can be automated is growing. One new area is teaching the AI to connect with human senses, such as sight and touch, expanding the tasks they are able to perform.

“With computer vision they’re able to look into applications; they’re able to assess the data; they’re able to assess the information from that data and then process it like humans would do,” Dridi said.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE