Beancounters at Gartner claim that robotic process automation (RPA) is becoming increasingly popular with large enterprises.
This means that global spend on the software will hit $680 million (£524 million) in 2018 a figure which is a 57 percent year-on-year increase from 2017.
Big G said that those adopting the technology are companies that specialise in insurance, utilities and communications and banks.
Cathy Tornbohm, vice president at Gartner said: “Typically, these organisations 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.”
“End-user organisations adopt RPA technology as a quick and easy fix to automate manual tasks. 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.”
RPA technology uses a combination of “user interface interaction describer technologies” to imitate the process a human would undertake to complete a task.
It also provides a broad range of solutions with tools to operate on individual desktops or enterprise servers.
The analyst predicts that 60 percent of organisations with a revenue of more than a billion dollars will have deployed RPA tools by the end of the year.
It estimates that by the end of 2022, 85 per cent of large and very large organisations will have deployed some form of RPA.
“The growth in adoption will be driven by average RPA prices decreasing by approximately 10 per cent to 15 per cent by 2019, but also because organisations expect to achieve better business outcomes with the technology, such as reduced costs, increased accuracy and improved compliance,” said Tornbohm.
