The Gift of Seeing (Guessing) Ahead – Predictions For The RPA | IA Market in 2021

👀 Some people have a gift for seeing and predicting the future. Not a vague, ambiguous prediction, but a reasoned, cautious and thoughtful foresight. My own method is to make bets about the future by: using data to know all the facts; living and breathing my expert space by developing a deep understanding of the market through research; by talking to as many experts as possible who are all much smarter than I am; using insight and hopefully seeing a trend or trends that nobody else sees. 

🤔 So what are my RPA and intelligent automation predictions (educated guesses) for 2021:

💡 1.) Truly digitally dexterous firms will arise.  Digital end-to-end operations will happen at pace because it has to.

💡 2.) Competency in the application of technology will be the key determiner between those organisations who survive and thrive, and those that do not will die i.e. Digital Darwinism.

💡 3.) Since Covid firms have truly come to value their people. Technology and customer obsession will be joined by employee obsession. Organisations will realise there is value triangle, and that Technology (TX), Customer (CX) and Employee (EX) experience are all critical parts of digital transformation.

Figure 1: The Digital Transformation Value Pyramid

💡 4.) Firms will realise the technology they use impresses no one; and start to understand that the employee (EX), customer experience (CX) and business experience they create with it is everything.

💡 5.) RPA | IA Centres of Excellent will become the norm and automation programs will start to gradually scale.

💡 6.) Resistance to RPA | IA driven change in organisations will disappear. As firms need to survive they will remove their people obstacles to change. If you cant change the people; change the people. But only after firms truly try to help their teams change first.

💡 7.) The costs of bots will decline regardless of how many product features are offered as competition ramps up. 

💡 8.) We will see $50 bots on desktops that are downloadable from Amazon.

💡 9.) RPA | IA will generate a healthy ROI as programs that don’t deliver an ROI in 12 months, simply won’t be allowed to start or continue.

💡 10.) The next generation entering the workforce won’t know what it is like to not have a bot / digital assistant working for them. They will also be the first generation to work to 100!

💡 11.) Vendors in the mid-market consolidate to compete against the bigger players if they cannot make head roads selling into SME markets.

💡 12.) Citizen Developers will start to far out weigh ‘developers’ in number and benefit delivered.

💡 13.) AI everything is happening and we don’t even realise. AI will transform firms focus for RPA | IA programs from ‘clickety click’ to ‘thinkety-think’ allowing end to end process transformation (but BPM systems will be needed) to deliver tangible ROI.

💡 14.) Cloud computing will take off at a scale. Cloud will leave on premise RPA | IA infrastructure in its wake as anywhere operations will necessitate this happens. Automation as a service AAAS will become a thing.

💡 15.) Code translators will allow companies to move between the so called big 3 vendors as churn becomes more prevalent.

💡 16.) Process mining, with an AI infused back bones, will start to work.

💡 17.) 5G will accelerate and 40% of people will work from home. Home will be anywhere and folks will have a digital assistant to help them connect with work. Robots will have to work on mobile.

💡 18.) Intelligent voice agents that do more than order milk (i.e. digital twins and chatbots at home, work and play).

💡 19.) Data Security will truly become key. Bots, ML / AI will guard data ruthlessly and efficiently 24/7 attacking those who attack. This will create more secure operations.

💡 20.) Organisations will finally realise that it is the data flowing through their systems and applications that is valuable not whether the have 5, 10 or 50 bots. They will see automation as a means to an end; but see the data as a way of achieving that end.

💡 21.) Open Source RPA | IA will become a growing area of interest for large and small organisations including banks and governments.

❓ What do you think of these predictions (aka my semi-educated guesses)?

👇 Let me know your thoughts in the comments below

#rpa #automation #digitaltransformation #technology #Future #innovation #Productivity #Analytics #businessintelligence