Intelligent Automation Week 2019 Recap

Last week, KnowledgeLake attended the highly-anticipated Intelligent Automation Week in Chicago. We gleaned a lot of insights into the market from our time at the conference. Regardless of industry, most top companies in the US are embracing automation, especially RPA. Many people’s titles at the conference included words like “Automation,” “RPA,” or “Innovation.” Most people who attended the conference already use RPA and are experiencing significant ROIs.

Despite all this, we’re still in the “early days” of RPA adoption. While some customers have rolled out large RPA implementations, most are still feeling their way around how to deploy and support the technology. The biggest scaling factor for existing RPA practitioners is making sure they have the requisite procedures, practices, and resources in place to support automations after they’re moved into production.

At the conference, we also saw that many companies have been sucked into the marketing and buzz of automation. They’ve tried products that promise AI and machine learning, tout themselves as no-code/low-code, or say that anyone and everyone can do it. They have seen the value but are at the point where they just want it to work. Many people at the conference thought you could just turn on RPA and walk away—this is clearly not the case.

For obvious reasons, people are looking for more RPA use cases. They’re also looking to include more technology—outside of just RPA—for manual user task automation, things like document/content understanding (capture), full process automation/workflow, etc.

RPA practitioners are also increasingly realizing that most of the data they are trafficking through their RPA automations originate from their most important documents. With this comes the realization that vendors—such as KnowledgeLake—who offer end-to-end solutions that include both transactional content management and RPA in a single cloud-based platform are more desirable than pure-play RPA vendors who force their customers to piece together a total solution.