As consultants, it’s only natural that we encounter numerous inquiries daily. Whether it’s about establishing a new program for success, scoping out processes ripe for improvement, or expanding use cases within an organization to achieve scalability, we take pride in being the go-to automation experts. With our extensive certifications and wealth of knowledge, we are committed to sharing valuable insights with our community and clients. 

As a trusted advisor and implementation partner, we guide top-tier organizations like yours on their automation journeys, helping them unlock new levels of efficiency, productivity, and growth. This new blog series aims to provide you a glimpse into our client conversations, offering our perspective on new technologies and best practices. We reaffirm why Reveal Group is your Intelligent Automation Services company. We are your trusted advisors, enabling you to #AutomateBetter.

How has the RPA landscape evolved over the past decade?

A decade ago, RPA (robotic process automation) emerged as a formidable force, initially focusing on task-based, high-volume, transactional automation—essentially transferring data between disparate systems primarily through user interfaces.

However, in the last 3-5 years, we have witnessed the proliferation of enablers and enhancers that have expanded the RPA ecosystem and allowed the technology to extend into more complex and higher-value use cases. An example of this is the vast improvements in accuracy and the growing number of players in the market for IDP (intelligent document processing), NLP/NLU (natural language processing/understanding) technologies, and more recently generative AI.

The early iterations of IDP were just machine learning algorithms “bolted on” to traditional OCR engines that could only address structured documents and limited use cases. Now we’re seeing combinations of OCR, data classification, data extraction, language processing & computer vision, along with machine learning. These have far higher extraction rates on various structured & semi-structured use cases. 

Unstructured data extraction is still maturing but there are some specific use cases where we’ve seen success, and this is rapidly growing with the more recent proliferation of technologies like ChatGPT. The ability to automatically digitize data that previously required human intervention and leveraging RPA as an orchestration tool that reads, writes, and presents information to end-users, has changed the game for the scope of digital transformation through automation.

What are the key differentiators of the top automation players?

When evaluating the differentiators among the top automation players in the industry, there are few disparities in the capabilities of the core unattended RPA platforms. However, some vendors have achieved greater advancements than others when it comes to attended bots.

The true differentiation emerges when analyzing the comprehensive nature of the various platforms.

For instance, UiPath has strategically built its technology suites to address the pain points encountered by its customers to have an in-platform answer for a wide variety of business problems. 

On the other hand, Blue Prism has doubled down on its core products while leveraging its technology alliance program to provide customers with best-of-breed technologies that extend their RPA platform, which includes notable collaborations like Expert.ai. Moreover, Blue Prism’s recent acquisition by SS&C brings Chorus BPM into the mix, creating an exciting opportunity for programs to solve larger business problems orchestrated by workflow tools.

Automation Anywhere has leaned hard into being cloud-native, with a complete rebuild a few years ago, and now has a future-facing product to show for it.  

Microsoft is worth mentioning; Power Apps and Power Platform are available on a lot of business and personal computers but are yet to reach enterprise-grade in terms of their process scalability, queuing and reporting. Their strength lies in the task automation space.

How does Reveal Group fit into all of this?

Reveal Group is an Intelligent Automation services firm that covers a broad range of technologies, including RPA, RDA, IDP, NLP/NLU, Workflow/BPM, and LLM. We have services specializing in program operating models, technology advisory, platform & infrastructure, discovery, delivery, quality control, change management, and managed services for each of these technologies. We’re your one-stop shop for all intelligent automation services, with a highly accredited team to solve your operational challenges. We built our brand foundationally on the notion that we deliver the highest quality automations with the highest value outcomes.