RPA Penetration in India: ´ Automation is no longer just nice to have´

Indian organizations are taking to the cost-efficient process of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) grandly, changing much in the process, such as Indian automation and the IT job landscape. RPA penetration in business processes in Indian organizations is significant. The RPA market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 20% until 2025 led by increasing pressure on enterprises to reduce costs, as well as to ensure faster cycle time to market. This indicates we can expect significant growth in the near future as well.

The Tech Panda spoke to Srividya Kannan, Founder, Director of Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd., a consulting and technology services company specializing in information management. Kannan says that the pandemic has accelerated automation in India.

The pandemic has only accelerated the pace of automation as enterprises look beyond the cost of just labor arbitrage towards building resilience in their processes to meet similar uncertainties in the future

“The pandemic has only accelerated the pace of automation as enterprises look beyond the cost of just labor arbitrage towards building resilience in their processes to meet similar uncertainties in the future. Most global in-house centers (GIC’s) located in India are already high in their maturity of adoption and are looking to further enhance their automation goals with a confluence of technologies like chatbot, ML and capture solutions. They are not only able to deliver significant cycle time reductions but are now also able to take incremental processes as a part of their offerings, thereby further strengthening their value proposition,” she says.

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She also adds that the demand pick-up for RPA in India is significantly increasing. Several enterprises are scaling their automation journey to automate several business processes, while some others are starting more seriously to look at delivering returns with automation. She elaborates this with some numbers.

“At least three of every five upper-mid to large enterprises have largely invested in automation tools. Most have deployed bots to automate a handful of processes, while the top 10% would have a full-fledged and well-functioning CoE set-up and automated several processes,” she says.

Why RPA?

Enterprises have a keen focus to bring down their operational costs, increase governance, and build resilience in their processes. The pandemic has further created a seismic shift in focus for enterprises towards minimizing disruption, getting to quick recovery, and building resilience in operations, going forward.

Enterprises are increasingly accelerating the pace of automation for their critical business processes to ensure minimal disruption in the face of uncertainties

“Enterprises are now taking a hard look at the way they conduct business, analyzing their spends and executing plans to conserve cash. Automation is no longer just nice to have. Enterprises are increasingly accelerating the pace of automation for their critical business processes to ensure minimal disruption in the face of uncertainties,” says Kannan.

Will RPA Change the Job Landscape in India?

As jobs become more contactless and automated, what can we expect from business processes like RPO? Kannan says the good news is that the potential for this technology to fuel jobs is beyond just developing bots to related areas such as process mining, process analytics, BPM, OCR, and cognitive machine learning in addition to security and governance.

This is a huge opportunity for our talent pool of both process experts as well as people with strong development and solution architecting skills

“There is a beeline of working professionals as well as freshers to skill themselves across these technologies to be relevant to meet the huge demand from enterprises,” she says.

She also says that it presents a great opportunity for India.

“India has the potential to be at the forefront for delivering global talent for automation with skills like AI, ML and RPA. This is a huge opportunity for our talent pool of both process experts as well as people with strong development and solution architecting skills,” she concludes.