The Evolution of RPA:
A 30-Year Journey

RPA: From UI testing to
enterprise and RPA-as-a-service

Source: www.grandviewresearch.com

Modern end-to-end automation has come a long way to become the new black. This section unfolds the history of RPA and traces the technology adoption over time. By taking this journey, you’ll also learn why RPA is a strong driver of accelerating the future of fully digitally transformed businesses.

The history of RPA

The 1990s: Adopting automation for UI testing

The story of RPA started with the automation of user interface (UI) testing. It usually means testing visual elements of interfaces to make sure they work correctly and a user won’t encounter any issues working with the app.

Back in the 90s, there were few computer models on the market, especially compared to nowadays. However, the primary typical computer user persona started to shift from huge corporations’ and governmental organizations’ employees to ordinary home-based users. This was largely due to the emergence of Windows 95, the canonical operating system of that time. As a result, the shift kickstarted UI testing development as the requirements and screen sizes became more diverse.

At the end of the 90s – early 2000s, companies came to the agile development concept, one of the key values of which is the prioritization of people over processes and tools. Organizations also recognized the need to speed up their operations to stay competitive in the marketplace. Thus, out of necessity, various UI testing and quality assurance (QA) automation scripts were born.

The 2000s: Banking and insurance automation

No wonder that banks and insurance companies were among the first ones to embrace the idea. Industries like these were becoming more subject to regulation, and RPA was a good way to reduce the amount of paperwork and improve compliance.

Another reason why banks and insurance companies were the pioneers of automation is that they had resources available. However, automation technologies still had their drawbacks. One of them was a high entry threshold. If a company wanted to automate its processes at that time, it would likely result in building a complex IT environment. The latter required expensive engineering skills and time-consuming integrations.

Demographics is also key. Since millennials (and already zoomers) started their careers, they wanted interesting, challenging tasks, not monotonous jobs. With the help of RPA bots, companies can easily automate the work of many departments and specialists. It means, when automation is efficiently implemented for tedious, repetitive tasks, employees become more efficient compared to previous years.

Such changes in demographics along with an MSPs’ focus on building recurring revenue drive the popularity of a bots-by-subscription business model. With this model, clients make periodic payments to MSPs instead of solid upfront costs, which allows an even wider variety of companies to access the benefits of RPA.

Future of automation: Automation-as-a-service

As automation-as-a-service continues to be the major driver for RPA market growth, RPA will penetrate more companies of all sizes with the help of managed service providers. RPA workflows will leverage more technologies from a hyperautomation stack, such as optical character recognition and computer vision. These technologies, brought by MSPs to their clients through integrations with RPA platforms, will enable a much broader automation-as-a-service market that will outgrow and outperform RPA as we know it today, potentially including physical robotics with a robot-as-a-service model.

The future of work is automation, and the future of automation is service-based. Managed service providers will continue to drive the change in the market, bringing together complex technologies and skilled talent to better serve their client needs.