Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a rapidly advancing field and is going through exponential change due to several internal and external factors.

Since the beginning of the Information Age, we have gone through many waves of process automation. We started with the computerization of lines of businesses led by Management Information Systems (MIS) groups within each organization. Once the businesses were computerized, we started looking for ways to optimize the business processes through Business Process Management (BPM). While BPM focused on end-to-end processes, RPA emerged as a way to automate discrete tasks using existing user interfaces.

Now, with significant capital being invested, we can see that RPA platforms are expanding, with the inclusion of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computer Vision (CV), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), process mining, chatbots, and many more. The RPA platforms are also morphing into enterprise-scale platforms with marketplaces, which we will explore in this appendix. This is leading to rapid changes and an RPA market that is much more advanced than the task automation that RPA started with.

Even as we wrote this book, a new version of Automation Anywhere A2019 was released. UiPath also came up with a new platform with products for each phase of the automation life cycle. We had to adjust to include the changes as they came up.

We are sure there will be many more rapid developments in this field. As we write this in March 2020, here is what we can see.