Spending on Robotic Process Software in 2018 Will Be $680 Million

Global spending on robotic process automation (RPA) software is estimated to reach $680 million in 2018, an increase of 57 percent year over year, according to Gartner. RPA software spending is on pace to total $2.4 billion in 2022.

“End-user organizations adopt RPA technology as a quick and easy fix to automate manual tasks,“ said Cathy Tornbohm, vice president at Gartner. “Some employees will continue to execute mundane tasks that require them to cut, paste and change data manually. But when RPA tools perform those activities, the error-margin shrinks and data quality increases.“

The biggest adopters of RPA today include banks, insurance companies, utilities and telecommunications companies. “Typically, these organizations struggle to knit together the different elements of their accounting and HR systems, and are turning to RPA solutions to automate an existing manual task or process, or automate the functionality of legacy systems,“ said Tornbohm.

Gartner estimates that 60 percent of organizations with a revenue of more than $1 billion will have deployed RPA tools by the end of the year. By the end of 2022, 85 percent of large and very large organizations will have deployed some form of RPA. “The growth in adoption will be driven by average RPA prices decreasing by approximately 10 percent to 15 percent by 2019, but also because organizations expect to achieve better business outcomes with the technology, such as reduced costs, increased accuracy and improved compliance,“ added Tornbohm.

However, RPA is not a one-size-fits-all technology and there are cases where alternative automation solutions achieve better results. RPA solutions perform best when an organization needs structured data to automate existing tasks or processes, add automated functionality to legacy systems and link to external systems that can’t be connected through other IT options.