The robotic process automation market is still in its early stages, and top industry players are fighting their way through somewhat turbulent times.

Take RPA leader UiPath Inc., tasked with facing the unknowns of an immature niche that is sometimes misunderstood. Despite strong earnings, which are above Wall Street estimates, the company has had volatile trading during the past few months (the stock slid 8% in one day in September).

There are big questions about market growth in a very competitive automation field. Where will UiPath and the rest of the RPA market be in the coming years?

Industry observers had a chance to find out more about the company and its future plans during the recent UiPath Forward IV conference. TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, covered the event with insider interviews, including UiPath’s Daniel Dines, Coca-Cola İçecek’s Leyla Delic, Spotify’s Sidney Madison Prescott, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield’s Jim Petrassi.

If you were unable to attend the event, here are five key revelations theCUBE uncovered during the conference. (* Disclosure below.)

1. RPA extends into all aspects of enterprise, not simply automating phone trees

Automation is taking off, and it’s rapidly moving beyond simple back-office automation. Customer service handling of incoming phone calls, RPA’s initial use case, while still valid, is being superseded by not only automation of repetitive back-office tasks, such as writing purchase orders, but by full-scale enterprise process analysis.

Chevron Corp. is one example of this forward thinking. During an interview with theCUBE, Vicki Harris, manager of application platform engineering services, revealed the company is even using RPA in oil and gas exploration.

“We extend [RPA] outside of traditional kind of HR, finance, audit practices into the rest of our business,” she said. “Mapping wells, drilling wells, you’d be surprised.”

What she is talking about is applying RPA to the disparate documents and multiple partners that make up field work in the oil and gas sector.

“Everybody’s producing a different type of document. How do you make some sense out of that?” she stated.

Also interestingly, she revealed that RPA solutions are functioning now similarly to traditional enterprise resource planning solutions in her environment.

2. Process-mining should be incorporated into RPA

The actual analysis of operational processes using data — an operation known as process-mining — is how one achieves an RPA-driven, digitally transformed businesses, noted one executive at UiPath.

“What we’re trying to do with continuous process discovery is enable you to identify the processes, figure out how to optimize them and then automate them,” said Palak Kadakia, vice president of product management at UiPath, in an interview with theCUBE. “We want to monitor them and then keep doing that cycle over and over again.”

It doesn’t need to be a guessing game as to what to and how to convert to RPA, but it can be a scientific approach instead: one where direction can be achieved through analysis of data, including learning through artificial intelligence. For instance, a company doesn’t need to simply guess which improvements can be made; it can mine the data, and that analysis will offer-up solutions to the enterprise, according to Kadakia.

Automation derived from RPA AI, technology that’s used by Coca-Cola İçecek, is delivered in part by two UiPath acquisitions from 2019: ProccessGold, a process mining platform, and StepShot, a software documentation tool automating the creation of tutorials, workflow walk-throughs and step-by-step guides.

“We improved credit limit approvals by 5% by removing unnecessary approval steps,” said Leyla Delic, group chief information and digital officer at Coca-Cola İçecek, in the same interview, explaining how the Turkey-headquartered soft drinks bottler applies AI-based process-mining using UiPath’s RPA solutions.

The technology helped the company improve both cash flow and customer-delivery timing, according to Delic.

3. RPA is supposed to free up workers to do more interesting jobs, but is there a skills gap?

One of RPA’s main benefits is taking over repetitive tasks, which frees up workers to handle more satisfying and less mundane tasks. This “upskilling” scenario becomes complicated, however, if an enterprise can’t figure out what skills are needed to perform the new job, as well as how to remove a skills gap.

“The number of jobs that are being displaced is growing by automation, but on the flip side, the number of jobs that are emerging is actually greater,” said Kevin Kroen, partner, PwC Advisory, intelligent automation and digital upskilling leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, during an interview with theCUBE. “And there is a consistent challenge that gets cited through all of our research … around the need to fill that gap, and most leaders feel like they’re not doing a good job to fill that.”

PwC says it has come up with a solution to this dilemma called ProEdge. The product focuses on identifying the skills needed for the future, teaching them and scaling the usage of the skills across the organization.

“Teaching non-technologists around the use of tools like robotic process automation is going to be one of those critical kinds of must-have skills in the future,” Kroen said. “How do we position people who now no longer are working on maybe 50% of what they’ve done in the past for their next role?”

4. Multiple paths are emerging for workers facing automation

Spotify AB, a Swedish audio streaming and media services provider, started its automation transformation about 18 months ago.

“Our journey began with trying to understand how we would tackle still wanting to upskill our employees despite the fact that we were in the middle of this kind of global crisis,” said Sidney Madison Prescott, global head of intelligent automation (RPA, AI, ML) at Spotify, in an interview with theCUBE. “Through that endeavor we decided to actually split out our different automation capabilities into citizen developer and unattended automation, and we did all of this through a center of excellence.”

Spotify is using UiPath no-code automation software, called StudioX, which provides an environment where businesses can automate their tasks. The resulting projects are then handled by robots situated in the cloud.

The company augmented its automation technology with a printed book, co-authored by Prescott, titled “Robotic Process Automation Using UiPath StudioX: A Citizen Developer’s Guide to Hyperautomation.”

“It really introducing users to what is StudioX and how really teaching individuals how to upskill themselves,” she added.

One of the primary goals of the book is to ease any fears users may have about walking through a platform like StudioX.

This approach to create an extensive citizen developer community — non-technical employees who build automations for themselves or close teams — functions based on the worker’s nuanced knowledge of the tasks as opposed to a mined data approach.

5. How real is the potential for job losses as a result of automation?

Bain & Co. believes workers should not be fearful of job losses through automation, and the company says employees are actually not fearful of the technology when quizzed.

“There’s a misconception with leaders that employees are fearful of job loss when you introduce automation,” said Purna Doddapaneni, associate partner at the consultant, in an interview with theCUBE. “What we have seen in our research is it’s completely the opposite. Employees are eager to adopt automation if given an opportunity.”

Some workers are especially suited to automation, according to James Droskoski, RPA senior sales director at UiPath, in a separate interview with theCUBE. Automation should make people’s work better regardless of factors like background, he explained, adding that new technology should be about the impact and the change it creates.

“Automation for good is about focusing on the people and how do we take the solutions and the programs and the technologies we have and make an impact so that somebody’s day is better, their job is better,” he said. “That process they’re doing is easier and they can focus on more of the things that make them different.”

Check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of during UiPath’s Forward IV conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the UiPath’s Forward IV conference. Neither UiPath Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image by TierenyMJ