More organizations across the globe are investing in business technology that streamlines enterprise workflow. The quest for business process automation is gaining new momentum, due in part to the increased demand for digital transformation.
Global robotic process automation (RPA) software end-user spending is projected to reach $2.9 billion in 2022 -- that's an increase of 19.5 percent from 2021, according to the latest market study by Gartner.
"By achieving a growth rate of 31 percent in 2021, the RPA market grew well above the average worldwide software market growth rate of 16 percent,” said Cathy Tornbohm, VP analyst at Gartner.
Robotic Process Automation Market Development
Organizations are leveraging RPA to accelerate business process automation initiatives and digital transformation plans, with the anticipated intent to improve their operational efficiency.
Although growing at a slower pace than in previous years, the worldwide RPA software market is projected to continue to experience double-digit growth in 2023 -- growing 17.5 percent year-over-year.
According to the Gartner assessment, RPA continues to be an attractive and high-growth market with IT vendors rapidly evolving their RPA offerings into a broader automation platform with embedded hyper-automation capabilities.
As a starting point toward hyper-automation, organizations will increase their spending on RPA software solutions because they still have a lot of repetitive, manual work that through automation could free up employees’ time to focus on more strategic work.
Competitive RPA vendors and many software vendors are pushing beyond a traditional single technology-focused offering to a more advanced suite of tools that encompasses low-code application platforms, process mining, task mining, decision modeling, iPaaS, computer vision, and IDP capabilities on top of their existing RPA offering.
Gartner analysts believe that this allows them to offer -- or rather makes them potentially poised to offer -- an all-encompassing hyper-automation enabling technology platform for the enterprise.
In fact, Gartner predicts that through 2024, the drive toward a state of hyper-automation will enable organizations to adopt at least three out of the twenty process-agnostic types of software apps.
Outlook for RPA Regional Growth Potential
North America, Western Europe, and Japan together are on pace to account for 77 percent of global RPA end-user spending in 2022. North America will account for the largest share at 48.5 percent, followed by Western Europe and Japan at 19 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
That said, I believe the United States is a high-growth market for low-code or no-code applications that enable business technologists -- e.g. employees that are outside of the traditional IT organization -- to quickly develop and test new digital workspace automation solutions.
The emergence and growth of distributed workforce models have driven the demand for rapid solutions to common use cases. Frontline employee workflow automation is now a key focal point of IT vendors that can also help enterprise CIOs and CTOs offer immediate results for their line-of-business leaders.