Data and analytics company GlobalData has predicted that robotics and automation will “disrupt” a range of sectors in the next 12 months, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Following its latest survey, GlobalData said automation is no longer a distant dream, with three quarters of executives reporting that they expected technologies such as 5G, cloud, IoT and AI to disrupt their sector in the next 12 months.
Charlotte Dunlap, principal analyst at GlobalData, said: “The pandemic has shown us just how vital intelligent automation and robotics advancements are for the new world of work.
“They are transforming traditional business processes such as X and Y into smooth, automatic workflows—vastly improving customer experience. The result will be a new workforce, whereby robotic process automation (RPA) replaces repetitive and mundane jobs while humans cover tasks that require personal interactions and high productivity.”
While robotics’ core heritage has always been RPA, more capabilities are coming to light, the company said. This ranges from process mining and intelligent document processing to API integration.
“Of the capabilities gaining popularity, process mining is certainly the most noteworthy,” Dunlap added.
“Process mining is the process of extracting and discovering patterns in data and turning these into actionable insights. In a nutshell, process mining helps operations identify hot spots where employee efforts are being wasted and/or processes are operating inefficiently and need reengineering.”
As a result of process mining’s progress, an increasingly popular use case for RPA is in intelligent document processing (IDP), which leverages AI and RPA to improve organisations’ operational efficiencies around document-intensive workflow processes, the survey found.
“What is most compelling about emerging robotics innovations is how relevant enterprises consider the technology for addressing their current (not future) digital and transformation issues,” Dunlap concluded.
