RPA spend to reach over $2 billion in 2022: Gartner

Gartner estimates that global spending on robotic process automation (RPA) software will total $2.4 billion in 2022, up from $680 million in 2018. This increase in spending is primarily driven by the necessity for organizations to rapidly digitize and automate their legacy processes as well as enable access to legacy applications through RPA. “Organizations are adopting RPA when they have a lot of manual data integration tasks between applications and are looking for cost-effective integration methods,” said Saikat Ray, senior research director at Gartner.

Gartner predicts that by the end of 2022, 85 percent of large and very large organizations will have deployed some form of RPA.Ray added that 80 percent of organizations that completed proofs of concept and pilots in 2018 will aim to scale RPA implementations and increase RPA spending in 2019.

This shows that the technology is viable and has the desired effects. However, application leaders who are new to the technology should start with a simple RPA use case and work with internal stakeholders to identify more applicable processes.

Moving forward, Gartner expects more organizations to slowly discover that RPA offers benefits beyond cost optimization. RPA technology can support productivity and increase client satisfaction when combined with other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as chatbots, machine learning and applications based on natural language processing (NLP).