Forbes recently published the answer of Antti Karjalainen to the question of what the future of RPA looks like (a forecast for the next decade). Here is the digest of that.
1. Some of the early hype will settle down in the coming years, and the technology landscape will become richer, with some of the big early players fading to the background.
2. As applications of RPA become more high-impact and business-critical, we start to see more developer-oriented tools emerging. With these developer tools, RPA implementation is becoming more of a domain for software robot developers, not as much for casual business users. Software robot developers want to embrace all the best practices of developers, so sharing and reusing code becomes a normal way of working.
3. It will soon be hard to justify license-costs for individual software robots when the technology for creating them is available for free on GitHub. With this change, the role of the software robot developer will be in high demand, as RPA starts coming available for new kinds of use-cases and broader audiences.