Delivering new insights into the future of work, Blue Prism announced the findings of its annual global survey in a report titled, The Impact of a Digital Workforce on Business Agility and Survival. The report, based on research conducted with more than 6,700 knowledge workers and senior IT decision makers globally, reveals that in the UAE 86% see robotic process automation as solving the global productivity problem, 97% for driving digital transformation, and 80% as essential for business to remain competitive.
C-suite executives globally are also embracing automation with 92% looking to deploy and extend these capabilities throughout their organizations, while 81% indicated RPA or automation is critical in scaling technologies such as AI across their business. From creating and enhancing jobs, saving time and costs, accelerating and improving work quality, and making organisations more innovative, those surveyed universally agree that RPA is providing a hugely positive impact on work, business agility and resilience.
The new normal post Covid-19
Gauging the impact Covid-19 is having on businesses, Blue Prism also surveyed its own global customer base and found that 94% see a renewed urgency to use RPA as a lifeline for maintaining business continuity and ensuring a higher level of overall responsiveness. 94% of these customers also see Blue Prism’s Digital Workforce enabling greater competitiveness while supporting remote collaboration in this new normal. 100% of respondents are now looking to expand or extend RPA use within their organisation, a sign of continued customer momentum and permanence.
Tackling global productivity
Across every industry, most knowledge-based work isn’t delivering anywhere near its potential, evidenced by diminishing global productivity that’s stagnated at one-tenth of what it was 40 years ago for some economies. With the pandemic, organisations face additional challenges from reduced workforces, customer demands and macroeconomic pressures. The survey results reveal a positive link between automation, global productivity, business agility and resilience.
In the UAE where 250 knowledge workers and 103 senior IT decision makers were surveyed as part of the study, 53% believe too much time is wasted on administration tasks, while it is telling that 87% of those decision makers see Automation as a solution to the global productivity problem, and 94% feel it can help them meet customer demands too.
Future-proofing businesses
In the UAE, 80% of decision makers believe that RPA and or Automation is essential for their businesses to remain competitive. These positive sentiments are a reflection of the major time savings, improved accuracy and cost savings reported by UAE business leaders, 98% of which already have plans in place to extend the use of automation across their businesses.
In today’s competitive economic environment, UAE decision makers also recognise that strategic technology investments like RPA can keep their digital transformation efforts on track. In fact, 97% surveyed identified RPA as an important factor in driving digital transformation – with over a third indicating that RPA allows them to scale the deployment of other emerging technologies too. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, 46% of UAE decision makers reported a struggle to meet customer demand, and 94% felt that automation would help address this challenge.
A skills shift coming
The global survey reveals there’s a need for re-skilling and training, with over three quarters surveyed indicating that there are skills which they are constantly sourcing for, such as data analysis and data science. To address this, 91% of UAE knowledge workers surveyed indicated their organisations are providing learning opportunities for new skills/qualifications when they introduce technologies that will transform their job.
Automation anxiety
Fear of automation is diminishing as there’s a growing level of trust with more organisations adopting digital colleagues. UAE knowledge workers are becoming increasingly comfortable with RPA, 52% worry about related job losses in the next three years. More than half of knowledge workers are excited at the opportunities that RPA will create, while decision makers feel that adopting new tech will attract talent. Encouragingly, 82% of UAE decision makers believe that their employees would trust working alongside a Digital Workforce and 78% would even trust them to manage employees.
All these results highlight RPA being used as a platform and not merely a productivity tool, giving customers access to end-to-end Intelligent Automation solutions that cover all IT environments, on-premises, cloud, hybrid and SaaS.
“These survey results help validate the sea change we see happening from automation,” says Jason Kingdon, Executive Chairman and CEO of Blue Prism. “Covid-19 has put a spotlight on just what a Digital Workforce can do for business continuity, but it is just the beginning. This is about using intelligent automation to empower the non-technical knowledge worker to do more, faster and more efficiently, without having to rely on IT. This goes beyond using desktop macros or screen scraping productivity tools for a quick ROI, intelligent automation is at the centre of enabling digital transformations for large scale enterprises.”
