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RPA Hype in 2024: Is RPA a Fixer or Hyperautomation Enabler?

RPA Hype in 2024: Is RPA a Fixer or Hyperautomation Enabler?RPA Hype in 2024: Is RPA a Fixer or Hyperautomation Enabler?

The level of interest in RPA before the financial crisis triggered by the coronavirus was quite robust. We cited industry analysts, participants as well as public sources showing that RPA has had stronger growth than most other software solutions, creating a >$1 billion market.

Is RPA just a hype since it is a quick fix? We and most industry analysts expect RPA growth to continue albeit at a slower pace in the future.

What is the level of interest in RPA?

Even though the crisis initially slowed down IT spending as companies aimed to preserve cash in an uncertain economic environment, digitization and automation initiatives, which result in cost savings, have remained popular according to our interactions with RPA software companies.

According to industry analysts

According to Gartner, RPA is the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market, and estimated that 85% of large and very large organizations will deploy some form of RPA. They estimate that RPA grew 63% in 2018 to $846 million with all top 3 vendors growing >40%.

Forrester shows the growth of the RPA market in the image below. While the total RPA market revenue was $125 million in 2016, the total valuation of the top 3 RPA firms became $10.8 billion, with total revenue of $1 billion in 2019, and the total RPA revenue is expected to increase to $1.5 billion in 2020.

Shows the evolution of the RPA industry until 2020

According to Google queries

As you can see in the graph at the top of the post, interest in RPA has been steadily growing, showcased by more people searching for the term “RPA” on Google.

According to industry participants

A 2020 survey by Deloitte states that 53% of their respondents started to implement some form of RPA, and this percentage will become 72% by 2022.

For more statistics on RPA market size forecasts and business adoption, you can read our article where we compiled 44 RPA statistics from reputable sources.

Fortune 500 CEOs also quickly got excited about RPA. John Cryan, CEO of Deutsche Bank said back in September 2017:

In our banks we have people behaving like robots doing mechanical things, tomorrow we’re going to have robots behaving like people

With so much interest in the topic, consulting companies like BCG, McKinsey, and Accenture have integrated RPA into their digitization solutions.

Did we reach peak RPA?

Time-series graph of online interest in RPA.
RPA has not reached its 2020-levels of popularity for 3 years now. Source: Google Trends

RPA saw a sustained interest from 2016 to early 2020. From 2020 until the present, the interest in RPA has slightly decreased but has been largely consistent from 2021. While we can’t predict whether RPA will reach its 2020 heights, we can expect interest in the technology to not fade due to the following reasons:

  • Expansion of RPA use cases in a wider range of business processes
  • Expanding RPA deployments within existing clients from pilot scale to more significant deployments
  • RPA vendors work with industry analysts focusing on hyper-automation. RPA is expected to play a large role as companies seek to further automate their processes
  • Launch of cheaper and open source RPA solutions attracting interest from SMEs and developers.

In the spring of 2020, interest in RPA decreased. The coronavirus outbreak has initially resulted in reduced interest in all topics as people learned about the novel virus. We expect RPA adoption to continue as cheaper and more capable RPA solutions become more widely available in both enterprises and SMEs.

UiPath, the market leader in terms of funding, raised $225M at a post-money valuation of $10.2 billion in July 2020 confirming continued investor interest in the topic. They cited COVID-19 as one of the accelerators of interest in RPA. However, most digital transformation-related companies say the same thing post-COVID. We can’t verify how true this is but we will know as we continue to monitor interest in RPA.

Will RPA continue growing?

RPA is expected to remain the fastest-growing enterprise tech. RPA has exhibited strong growth in the past and most industry analysts expect the global RPA market revenues to continue growing at a strong pace:

When will RPA become obsolete?

Though there are great tools for financial modeling, most acquisitions worth billions have models built in Microsoft Excel. This is because Excel is flexible, analysts are familiar with it, and modeling businesses require significant flexibility. Even those specialized solutions will limit RPA’s scope, we expect it to be resilient.

However, similarly flexible but even easier-to-use tools could replace RPA. APIs and cloud migration could trigger the growth of no code automation tools to replace RPA. For more, feel free to read our article on whether RPA will be obsolete.

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Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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1 Comments
Oliver Harris
Mar 31, 2021 at 01:18

Hyper-automation and RPA is cross-functional collaboration. Hyper-automation brings RPA into a higher level of automation. Automations are developed due to a new process is required, and advancements in automating processes that were not easy to automate before. Still, I think RPA will be in demand as long as it serves the purpose of the organization.

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