Everything Will Be Accelerated in 2019

Leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software company, UiPath, issued its top five predictions for 2019 in Europe.

The predictions are those that the UiPath automation experts believe will have the biggest impact on enterprises in Europe and beyond over the next 12 months. Acceleration of automation emerges as the dominant trend, along with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) to provide transformative new cognitive capabilities.

“We believe enterprise leaders in Europe and the Middle East will accelerate automation to achieve their digital transformation strategies in 2019,” said Kulpreet Singh, MD, EMEA, UiPath. “RPA has one of the fastest rates of implementation in the history of technology and 2019 will see that exponential growth continue, diversify and reach new audiences.”

The top five predictions from UiPath are:

The pace of automation will increase 
-- Kulpreet Singh, MD, EMEA, UiPath

In Europe and the Middle East (EMEA), large-scale RPA implementations will advance rapidly, turbo-charged by the spread of expertise through widely available training programmes, new open marketplaces and the maturation of internal centres-of-excellence.

This is why large-scale implementations will advance more quickly in EMEA than other parts of the world, especially when it comes to deploying attended software robots in a wide range of settings.

Public sector organisations will follow divergent paths to automation 
-- Ian McGregor, VP of EMEA Sales, UiPath

In the U.K., government spending constraints will trigger a wave of automation in the public sector. Some organisations will start from scratch, while others will hire third-party vendors. This is likely to result in inadequate coordination, and the likelihood of overlaps is high. Public organisations with established RPA pilots will seek approval for consolidation by demonstrating their achievements to-date.

Automation will be democratised through global vendor education initiatives 
-- Ana Cinca, VP of Enabling Technologies, UiPath

The first moves to democratise RPA through the power of education will take effect in 2019.

Universities will address automation through extensive collaboration with established vendors, while students and current software robot users will have access to online learning resources vital to the skills base of future RPA users and software programmers. Far-reaching youth initiatives will ensure that young people have a greater understanding of automation and AI, dispelling common prejudices about the technologies.

Senior executives will back RPA, as systems integrators seek a piece of the action 
-- Kedar Dani, VP and Head of Strategic Accounts EMEA, UiPath

It will be easier to gain senior executive sponsorship for automation because the benefits of RPA have become so obvious, with fast growing awareness that pilots have exceeded expectations.

Systems integrators will increase the pool of skilled automation experts operating across the full range of industries and processes. Competition between them for automation projects will inevitably intensify.

Insurers will strike out for AI 
-- Elaine Mannix, Global Insurance Leader, UiPath

Insurers will make amazing strides in 2019, with automation providing the path to AI, provided they have the fundamentals in place and know their end-to-end processes and systems.

Natural language processing, machine learning, optical character recognition and sentiment analytics will augment automation and insurers will start deploying attended software robots on more and more employees’ desktops.