How much money did the RPA market generate in revenue in 2023? How many times does the RPA market’s annual growth rate exceeded the average worldwide software market’s growth rate? Finally, what are the three key trends in the RPA market, according to Gartner?
Fortunately, the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Robotic Process Automation report is not only one image with vendors divided into 4 groups, it also provides a lot of valuable information including answers to the questions listed above. If you haven’t yet read the entire report, the answers to these 3 questions are provided here:
- The RPA market generated $3.2 billion in revenue in 2023, up from $2.6 billion in 2022.
- The annual growth rate of the RPA market exceeded the average worldwide software market’s growth rate by 2 times (22% vs. 11%, respectively).
- According to Gartner, the three key trends in the RPA market are the following:
AI is at the Core of RPA Vendor Strategy
In response to the hype surrounding AI and LLMs, RPA vendors are strategically positioning their platforms as essential tools in a more AI-centric future. Vendors are designing product roadmaps that focus on delivering AI trust, risk and security management (TRiSM), enhanced AI skills and studios, expanded access to general-purpose LLMs (from the likes of Amazon, Anthropic and OpenAI), and the development of proprietary specialized LLMs.
In the near term, customers should expect that AI development features in RPA platforms will yield improved self-healing capabilities, script remediation and IDP extraction accuracy.
RPA Vendors Are Investing Heavily in GenAI Automation Development
RPA vendors are investing heavily in GenAI to aid customers in developing automations. Most vendors have focused on creating prompt-based development features that translate natural language requests into automation workflows. This makes automation development less technical and more broadly accessible to citizen developers in an organization.
Prompt-based development is a useful tool for starting a larger automation effort or designing simple workflows, but prompt-based development currently has limited use in building end-to-end automations for complex workflows. Customers should experiment with prompt-based automation development if they can access these emerging capabilities for a reasonable price.
In the long term, customers should expect vendors to develop more advanced AI-augmented automation development features. In a major step toward autonomous business, GenAI may eventually ingest recordings from task-mining technology and autonomously build automations that mimic tasks that employees routinely perform.
RPA Vendors Deliver Broader Orchestration and Automation
Most RPA vendors now offer platforms that extend beyond RPA by supporting a mix of automation technologies, including IDP, BPA, conversational AI, LCAP, process mining, task mining, test automation and iPaaS. This convergence into a larger automation platform requires strong orchestration capabilities across natively integrated and third-party solutions.
Customers should expect RPA providers to become more creative in how they package and price offerings. Vendors understand that customers do not want to pay for technology they don’t need, but vendors also know that customers might pilot new technologies if they are packaged in a low-cost, low-risk bundle. To harness the most value from bundled automation capabilities, customers should seek out platforms that offer robust process modeling and governance as well as a unified user experience.
