– Must read industry report contains proprietary data and key findings from thousands of customers, including pacesetters with best-in-class ROI

– Study uncovers five times as many customers are opting for cloud RPA over on-premises platforms, signalling acceleration of cloud adoption

Cloud-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has seen a dramatic uptick as organizations rapidly pivot to the cloud as part of their digital transformation strategies, with a more than 1,000% surge year-over-year, according to the second in a series of must read global RPA impact reports from Automation Anywhere and leading research firm Enterprise Technology Research (ETR).

Now & Next: State of RPA, which explores the present-day impact of RPA and future-looking predictions, uncovered that five times more customers are now choosing cloud RPA over on-premises. According to the survey, over the next year the percentage of respondents to the survey who say they will have cloud-only RPA deployments will also increase 12 points to nearly 40%. At the same time, the number of respondents who say they will have on-premises RPA deployments will drop precipitously, to just 10%, about one-fourth of what they are today.

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The semi-annual report, conducted by ETR, gleaned data from more than 1,000 Automation Anywhere customers and hundreds of technology executives from Global 2000 and Fortune 500 firms across nine industries.

“Cloud RPA is clearly the platform of choice for faster deployment, innovation, resiliency, security and the fact that it can be used from anywhere,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO and Co-founder of Automation Anywhere. “Customers have told us that as the initial shock of the pandemic waned, they realized that digital transformation was crucial to bolster resiliency, and that cloud RPA has become an essential aspect of that transformation.”

The research also revealed that the average return on investment (ROI) remained an impressive 250% on average, with high-performing businesses achieving a 380% ROI, keeping RPA at the top of the list of technologies that can deliver both a substantial and rapid payoff.

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Cloud RPA has also allowed business users and citizen developers to be much more productive. Productivity improvement was the most widely achieved benefit of RPA, followed by moving the workforce to higher-value work. These notable productivity increases have led organizations to be much more supportive and enthusiastic about RPA as a way to address the urgent business mandates they face today—to cut costs, improve operational efficiencies, and boost innovation.

“Efficiency is obviously one of the outcomes of RPA, but you also get teams more energized and starting to think about processes differently, both in our organization and across National Health Service,” said Tremaine Richard-Noel, Head of Emerging Technology at Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust, United Kingdom, “For us, RPA from Automation Anywhere has been a catalyst for transformation, not just in our organization, but across the wider NHS. We knew it would increase productivity and allow us to repurpose thousands of hours, and now we’re identifying ways that we can free up time to focus on higher-value activities, like patient care.”

The Now & Next: State of RPA report combines Automation Anywhere customer data with survey results to bring insights, best practices, trends, and recommendations for organizations currently deploying or planning to deploy RPA and AI.