RPA Benefits: 20 Ways Bots Improve Businesses in 2025

RPA adoption has surged, streamlining business tasks with accessible automation solutions. Up to 80% of rule-based processes can be automated; however, businesses often do not capitalize on this opportunity, frequently due to limited awareness.

Explore the top 20 RPA benefits, with insights into its impact on efficiency, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction.

What are the overall RPA benefits?

1. Improved business results

RPA directly and indirectly enhances business outcomes by:

• Increasing process quality with enhanced accuracy, speed, and 24/7 availability.
• Reducing employee workload on repetitive tasks, enabling focus on value-adding activities, ultimately benefiting the business’s top or bottom line.

2. Increased focus on higher value activities

By taking over routine tasks, RPA frees up business teams to concentrate on more strategic activities. For example:

• Sales representatives can automate mundane tasks, such as finding contact details or sending introductory messages, to dedicate more time to engaging with prospects.
• In finance, after RPA automates report generation, teams can spend more time analyzing data for valuable insights, which has contributed to RPA’s role in creating new jobs.

3. Reduced wage costs

According to Deloitte’s Global RPA Survey, organizations leveraging RPA report an average capacity increase of 20% through robotic processes, with some achieving as much as 52%. These numbers illustrate the transformative potential of RPA in optimizing operations.¹

A prominent case involves a leading global bank that employed cognitive RPA to automate 57% of its payment processing tasks in foreign trade finance. This initiative dramatically reduced the number of full-time employees required for the operation from 110 to 47, cutting the salary budget by over half while maintaining high operational accuracy and efficiency.

Such outcomes highlight the significant cost savings and resource optimization RPA can bring to industries managing high-volume, repetitive processes.²

Addressing job displacement concerns

Job displacement for roles that involve easily automated tasks, particularly among workers without skills for non-automatable positions might be a concern. Businesses can mitigate these challenges by:

• Redeployment: Shifting employees to roles that match their skills within the company.
• Upskilling: Offering retraining programs to equip employees with new skills and placing them in new roles.
• Severance and Support: Providing severance and reskilling options when no internal opportunities exist, ensuring employees can transition smoothly to new roles.

Even with a preserved headcount, automation makes a company leaner with process improvements and potential efficiencies beyond headcount (e.g. reducing SaaS spend by using fewer SaaS tools thanks to automation).

4. Improved ROI

Organizations implemented Robotic Process Automation (RPA) have reached 250% average Return on Investment (ROI). Some of them even reached ROI up to 380%.³

Learn more about how to measure RPA’s implementation success.

5. Reduced implementation risk

Unlike traditional system upgrades that can be costly and disruptive, RPA is a low-risk, non-invasive solution. It integrates seamlessly into legacy systems, reduces manual errors, and enhances security by limiting unauthorized access.

Case study:

For example, a financial services provider leveraged RPA to automate processes in:

• Audit
• Assurance
• Tax
• Consulting
• Cybersecurity
• Privacy

They claim that a single RPA bot was able to:

• Complete the tasks of one or more employees,
• And that they were able to entirely eliminate quality-check and risk management effort across rule-based tasks.

The result was $8M of savings in annual risk management costs.⁴  

6. On-time process execution

RPA bots can initiate tasks on schedule, ensuring punctuality for critical functions, like paying vendors on time. This helps maintain production schedules and liquidity.

Example: Bots can be programmed to automate payments and send reminders for overdue invoices, reinforcing timely execution.

Customer satisfaction benefits

7. Increased customer engagement

Robotic process automation streamlines customer interactions, reducing the chances of unaddressed issues. Automated workflows ensure that customer concerns are consistently handled, boosting satisfaction.

• For instance, RPA-enabled chatbots can simulate human interactions, resolving common inquiries and escalating complex ones.

8. Reduced data entry errors

Human errors in data entry are costly. Human errors and low-quality data are estimated to cost businesses billions of dollars each year.⁵ RPA software eliminates these by maintaining data consistency and logging events for traceability.

• Case Study: A bank using RPA for data entry and verification saved $1M annually by minimizing errors.

The initiative resulted in significant error reduction and saved the bank $1M in annual costs.

However, this does not mean that RPA provides error-free operation. RPA is not suitable for all processes, and edge cases that were not part of test cases have the potential to cause RPA bots to malfunction. RPA operations should be checked from time to time to ensure that edge cases are also covered successfully by RPA bots.

9. Faster service

Employees and IT teams spend significant time on routine tasks. Automating these through RPA enhances efficiency and response times.

• Example: Piraeus Bank cut loan application processing from 35 minutes to 5 minutes using RPA.

Technology unit benefits

10. Reduced IT workload

RPA empowers business users to automate tasks, reducing the IT department’s burden. Combined with workload automation, RPA solutions supports IT in business processes like SLA management, cloud provisioning, and workflow monitoring. So that human employees can focus on more complex tasks instead of manual tasks.

Learn more about IT process automation.

11. Improved focus on IT innovation

IT teams spend ~30% of their time on repetitive, mundane tasks, such as data entry, reporting, and solving rule-based helpdesk issues.

Leveraging RPA in IT services, such as:

• Data and network management
• System updates
• Employee onboarding
• Employee offboarding

Enables IT teams to focus on high-value tasks. For example, research has shown that employees who had more free time due to automation focused on innovation, accepting new challenges at work, and developing their skills. 

While focus is key for any department, it’s especially critical for IT as it has the challenging task of serving all departments. Having less automation-related work allows IT to focus on more important technology problems, such as finding ways to better align technology with business goals.

Analytics benefits

12. Improved data quality

Higher data quality from reduced errors translates into more reliable analytics.

• RPA can achieve data extraction accuracy rates up to ~99%, vastly outperforming manual processes.

13. Broadened data collection

RPA bots can collect data from legacy systems and the web, providing analytics teams with broader and more accessible data.

• For instance, RPA can automate data gathering on competitor prices and customer sentiment for strategic analysis.

Learn more about web scraping applications to explore web data benefits and use cases. 

14. Reduced workload on data science teams

Data science teams spend up to 80% of their time on data preparation.⁶ Implementing robotic process automation in data collection enables these teams to concentrate on high-level analytics and model development.

HR benefits

15. Increased employee satisfaction 

A survey revealed that:⁷

• 89% of employees are more satisfied with their job
• And 84% are more satisfied with their company, as a result of using automation in the workplace.

Employees have also reported that automation has provided them with more time to:

• Learn new skills
• Take on new challenges and projects
• Deepen relationships with customers and stakeholders

16. Efficient change management

Change management refers to any change that’s made to a process. For instance, a purchasing manager might want to switch suppliers. They have to submit a request to their immediate superior, with the reason why, and alternative vendors.

Companies can leverage RPA bots to automate their change management. For instance, instead of the manual submission of the change request form, employees can fill digital documents and the OCR and NLP-driven RPA bots can read, evaluate, and provide a preliminary assessment of the urgency of the issue.

The benefit is that the end-to-end process of change management can be made more efficient and quicker.

17. Lower churn rates

Leveraging RPA to automate repetitive mundane tasks will reduce churn rates as employees will be more satisfied while focusing on higher-value tasks.

• Example: Automation fosters collaboration and problem-solving by freeing employees to focus on complex tasks and innovation.⁸

18. Reduced hiring costs

This is an indirect effect but reducing manual labor boosts satisfaction and makes a company more attractive, thus facilitating hiring.

For example, a UK-based company leveraging RPA for operations automation was able to cut down on the cost of recruitment and training of 22 staff members. 

Compliance benefits

19. Minimizing exposure to sensitive data

Automating sensitive data processes via RPA minimizes human contact with that data, reducing the probability of fraud and compliance issues.

For example, a US-based bank leveraged RPA for optimizing anti-money laundering processes for KYC automation, periodic client reviews, and suspicious activity monitoring.

The results were increased regulatory compliance 75% savings on due-diligence costs.⁹

20. Maintaining an audit trail

RPA bots generate event logs of the processes they automate, creating accurate audit trails in case issues arise.

For example, a telecommunication company leveraged RPA for automating maintenance processes. This resulted in a 78% reduction in maintenance efforts and improved IT audit quality due to detailed event log records.

See our article about compliance automation to explore use cases in detail.

Moving on to RPA implementation

Companies essentially face 2 options to minimize effort for repetitive tasks that require little human judgment:

1. Upgrade existing legacy systems to modern ones which enable automation
2. Use bots to interface with legacy systems and automate these tasks

If you choose the second option because of the cost or schedule of system upgrades, you need to choose an RPA partner.

We have an in-depth guide for comparing RPA vendors and a complete list of RPA products.

External Links

• 1. Industries | Deloitte .
• 2. Robotic process automation: A path to the cognitive enterprise | Deloitte Insights.
• 3. “Now & Next: State of RPA”, Automation Anywhere, retrieved on 15 November, 2024
• 4. RPA Solution for Financial Services—Case Study | Cognizant.
• 5. How To Create A Business Case For Data Quality Improvement.
• 6. Why data preparation is an important part of data science?.
• 7. New Salesforce Research Links Lower Stress Levels and Business Automation - Salesforce. Salesforce
• 8. “Automation of Routine Work: A Case Study of Employees’ Experiences of Work Meaningfulness“, Staaby A., Hansen K. S., Grønli T., Researchgate, retrieved on November 15, 2024
• 9. Banking on robotics | Case study | Genpact. Genpact