Only one software giant to make impact on the robotic process automation market, says analyst Microsoft is set to be the only firm among the enterprise tech giants investing in robotic process automation (RPA) tools to make a significant impact, a report from Forrester claims. The RPA market is set to be worth $2.9bn by revenue in 2021, up from $125m in 2016, while the two biggest players in the game, Automation …
The biggest value of RPA tooling is not automation, but Analysis.
While RPA tools are great for screen scrapping, the advent of Single-Page-Application frameworks {Angular, React, Vue, Elm, etc} has rendered a generation of automations redundant because [1] pages are more complex [2] web-services are better suited to traditional integration (even if the integration is node.js mashup)
*Attempting* RPA, is a good way to perform process analysis, but the outcome is just as likely to provide information for an integration project as it is for a robot - and in a small number of low-volume cases it's actually cheaper to get people to do it.
The exception is where the integration touch-points are well understood by the vendor, or they have hooks in the API (usually because they wrote it). This is why Microsoft is likely to be the biggest winner:
[1] Outlook/Exchange/Office365 are the largest automation surface (even if few are using Dynamics, or hosting in Azure), and Active-Directory is the trust mediator
[2] RPA tooling can be discounted for platform lock-in
Only AI-parsing is a novelty in the entire field of "robotic process automation", nothing else has been fundamentally new proposed. (This AI-parsing replaces the outdated n-gram parsing, helping to structure texts into a format that is understandable to computer.) And finding the right information in the right context is simple. So, the new thing that Microsoft has added to "robotic process automation", is its search for textual information.
Microsoft is investing in the Future: AI can be trained and can learn. Enough to explain AI some initial texts, explaining which word refers to which part of speech and its meaning, as in the future AI begins by itself. Of course, AI should be helped and corrected, which is no different from teaching a child.
By teaching AI texts, Microsoft using the basics of cybernetics, will also teach AI how to handle receptors and manipulators, establishing a direct connection-correlation with textual information. This tactic will help Microsoft save fabulous money on programmers, since the AI will be trained by itself and using texts.
Microsoft is investing in a gold mine!
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