UiPath (NYSE: PATH), a leading enterprise automation software company, today published the findings of a report based on interviews with enterprise CIOs in Europe. The findings reveal that hybrid work, increasing demands from customers, and challenges from new competition are driving organizations to automation-first strategies built on robotic process automation (RPA), AI, and low-code and no-code tools.

The report, Towards The Fully Automated Enterprise™, was authored by CIONET to understand CIOs’ role in orchestrating the reinvention of business and the redesign of work. CIOs reported the significant changes caused by the pandemic on business practices are resulting in implementations of enterprise automation to achieve replacement of legacy systems with modern solutions (29%), comprehensive process reengineering (26%), and elimination of repetitive work with RPA (24%)ⁱ.

The report also highlights that the benefits of adopting intelligent automation are available only to those businesses in which CIOs become sponsors of innovation and proponents of governance and involve the IT organization as early as possible. The CIOs stated that intelligent automation will play a key role in levelling the playing field between incumbents and digital leaders during the next five years.

According to the report, leading CIOs are currently using software robots to:

• Assist or remove employees from low-value, repetitive tasks, redesigning mission-critical business workflows and, in some cases, adopting new business models.
• Strengthen their relationships with consumers and business customers alike by applying software robots to assist in analyzing vast amounts of data that is emerging from online channels and connected products and services.
• Accelerate product and service innovation by transforming their organizations into digital businesses, where open platforms, ecosystems, and new development tools can reduce the time to market dramatically.

Respondents shared that currently, the adoption of automation is still at an early stage of maturity, with a lot of potential remaining untapped. Deployment strategies include applying short-term fixes to reduce costs and speed up critical processes, adopting an evolutionary approach and saving major disruption while generating business benefits, and taking radical action such as replacing legacy systems entirely or adopting new solution models.

CIOs play a pivotal role in driving the adoption of intelligent automation across the enterprise. Having achieved successful cloud and mobile platform migrations, the CIOs surveyed believe that automation is set to become “their next big thing.” In order to take the lead on automation and become sponsors of innovation, CIOs must undertake the following actions:

• Evaluate RPA, AI, and process mining through controlled pilots, sponsored where possible at group level. Examine appropriate platforms that will enable the scaling up of RPA as and when value is proven;
• Inform peers in the C-suite of the potential opportunities and benefits that automation brings and agree to an appropriate roadmap; and
• Work with lines of business to explore and test low code/no code approaches toward intelligent automation.

“Innovation and digitalization will make our lives better. So, our role is to be humble on the one hand and brave on the other. Before choosing our preferred automation tool, we looked at the market and sought the best solution to use in our organization. As a result, we are using UiPath, and in our experience, this is an easy-to-use and stable end-to-end automation platform. We are currently running more than 100 robots, which in 2020 only performed more than 30 million transactions,” Adam Marciniak, former CIO of PKO Bank Polski, said.

“At Euroclear, we process a lot of unstructured data in the back office. For that we use software robots – especially unattended robots that can check for sanctions of run anti-money laundering checks. It would simply be impossible to scale one’s business in these areas because then your operations would be overblown. That’s why RPA is the next big thing – because it allows one to scale their business while cutting down on operational costs,” said Michał Paprocki, CIO at Euroclear.

“For the past decades, building the fully automated enterprise has been an ongoing journey for many CIOs. Today, organizations can unlock enterprise automation technology that can accelerate the reinvention of business, boosting productivity to best cope with increased customer demands and the new reality of hybrid work,” Renzo Taal, Senior Vice President & Managing Director EMEA at UiPath, said. “And, in doing so, they can attain digital leadership in a competitive global business landscape by transforming their business into a fully automated enterprise.”

Download the Towards The Fully Automated Enterprise™ report here. The report was developed by CIONET, the leading community of more than 10,000 senior IT executives in Europe and Latin America in partnership with UiPath, based on interviews with CIOs from 15 leading Europe-based enterprises.

About UiPath

UiPath has a vision to deliver the Fully Automated Enterprise™, one where companies use automation to unlock their greatest potential. UiPath offers an end-to-end platform for automation, combining the leading Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution with a full suite of capabilities that enable every organization to rapidly scale digital business operations.

ⁱ Source: CIONEXT ‘Reinvent Business, Reinvent Work’ May 5, 2021