UiPath has announced the results of the IDC APJ Automation Survey 2022, commissioned by UiPath, revealing that 84 per cent of the Indian organisations will scale up their robotic process automation (RPA) initiatives or achieve an enterprise-wide RPA deployment by 2025. The survey also highlighted that 90 per cent of Indian organisations today do not have an enterprise-wide RPA program in place despite recognising the importance and benefits.
The survey polled organisations in nine countries across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), including Australia, China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand. It examined the level of automation maturity for APJ organisations, and how enterprises can scale automation to achieve business growth and outcomes. Fundamentally, 88 per cent of the organisations in India agree that automation will be a critical requirement for business excellence, customer experience, and competitive success within the next 3 years.
Commenting on the results, Michael Araneta, associate vice president, IDC Financial Insights, said, “APJ business leaders are increasingly acknowledging the pivotal role of automation in resolving their pain points and accelerating growth across the region, against the backdrop of an intensifying competitive climate and turbulent macroeconomic environment. While improving operational efficiencies and enriching customer experience have been top of mind for leveraging automation, many organisations also believe that automation is a pathway towards meeting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainability goals, which will be a gamechanger for corporate trustworthiness. However, despite securing these unprecedented benefits, most organisations have been slow in taking the leap into implementing an enterprise-wide automation program due to myriad yet addressable challenges, including finding automation skills and talent, identifying the right automation software, and ensuring robust security and governance.”
Meanwhile, Scott Hunter, vice president, Strategic Engagements and Transformation, Asia Pacific and Japan, UiPath, said, “In this fast-changing dynamic world, automation has become a requirement for businesses to excel and their customer experience excellence with competitive success. In the next couple of years, we expect Indian organisations to fast-track automation implementations alongside an increased focus on intelligent process automation. While finding the right talent and automation skill remains one major challenge today, it is critical for organisations to focus on training and development plans to help with reskilling and upskilling across teams and units.”
The new survey also found that automation has become an important accelerator as enterprises look to achieve exponential growth.
Indian organisations to accelerate automation investments in the next 3 years
Between 2020 and 2021, automation spending has continued to accelerate as 82 per cent of the organisations in India have increased spending. Further indicating the growing prioritisation for automation, 32 per cent of the Indian organisations have increased automation spending by 20 per cent. The top business priorities for implementing automation include improving operational efficiencies (82 per cent), delivering effective customer experiences (76 per cent), and streamlining processes (70 per cent).
Araneta added, “In India, automation is becoming a discussion at the C-suite level, with about one in two (48 per cent) Indian respondents acknowledging that their CIOs or CTOs are leading the automation drive towards enterprise-wide adoption.”
Additionally, with the growing significance of ESG and sustainability, there is a massive upsurge expected in APJ organisations to garner automation investments for related use cases. About 16 per cent of the Indian organisations will automate ESG and sustainability use cases next.
Paradigm shift to intelligent process automation
About 65 per cent of the Indian organisations intend to use intelligent process automation (IPA) in over 30 per cent of the total deployments in the next three years. Given that the IPA software market in APJ is estimated to grow to $5.5 billion in 2025, this highlights the necessity and potential to go beyond RPA to achieve comprehensive end-to-end process automation at scale.
Lack of skilled talent hampers enterprise-wide scaling of automation
However, the talent crunch has become a significant business challenge as many APJ organisations point to the shortage of automation skills and talent as the top challenge they face in scaling automation. 74 per cent of the organisations in India said that finding automation skills and talent is their top challenge. As a result, 50 per cent said that the availability of skilled automation talent and strong implementation partners’ support are key when selecting automation solutions, while 84 per cent said they look out for end-to-end enterprise grade solutions with a modern and modular architecture.
Citizen-led development and training become hygiene needs in the future of work
Across India, 38 per cent of the organisations already have non-IT domain employees involved in automating aspects of their work in 2022, while 40 per cent plan to get their employees involved. In APJ, the banking and insurance industry is leading the pack, with 56 per cent of non-IT domain employees already involved in automation, followed by the telecommunications (50 per cent) and retail (49 per cent) sectors.
As more organisations integrate automation in the work of non-IT domain employees, respondents in India highlighted that collaboration with IT (54 per cent), approval from senior leadership (20 per cent), and clear guidance on best practices (14 per cent), are the key requirements for successful implementations. Additionally, organisations will need to develop a comprehensive training and development plan focusing on reskilling and upskilling across teams and units, which only 46 per cent of the Indian organisations are currently doing.
Further, Balaji Rajagopalan, head, Bank Technology Group, ICICI Bank, said, “Since 2020, IPA has played a pivotal role in ICICI Bank by augmenting customer experience and driving operational excellence. Automation has been a linchpin in the bank’s risk-calibrated growth strategy and has enabled the teams to manage massive upsurges in the volumes of transactions and requests during the pandemic with a consistent throughput time. going forward, IPA will continue to be a vital component of the bank’s technology strategy 2025 and more teams are expected to turn to automation to bring exceptional value by delivering real-time personalised customer journeys and superior business outcomes.”
