While organizations around the globe have been affected by the wide-ranging ramifications of the Coronavirus, just months after the start of the largest lockdown in history, enterprises are figuring out how to survive – and thrive – within the confines of the new reality.

While enterprises worldwide are embracing robotic process automation (RPA) and process discovery in their digital transformations, many organizations are challenged to quantify the value of their investments. To determine the potential ROI of Kryon’s Full-Cycle Automation Suite—the only enterprise solution encompassing both proprietary AI-driven Process Discovery and RPA— Kryon commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study from Forrester Consulting. The results speak for themselves.

You can listen to the webinar with Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Craig Le Clair, Forrester consultant Josphine Phua, and Kryon Corporate Intelligence Lead Vita Zlotova talk about how the pandemic is affecting the market, the study findings, and what they mean for enterprises.

Shifting Priorities
Though the pandemic has significantly stressed many sectors of the global economy, it’s accelerating RPA planning and strategies. Digital transformation has been discussed for years now, but in reality, progress has been slow. Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly everyone was working from home, using collaboration platforms, and scrambling to conduct remote business. There was a tremendous surge in digital transformation to help workers stay productive, which is positively affecting the RPA market.

At the same time, current events have caused a shift in roadmaps. Rather than transformational initiatives, the focus will be on producing more at lower costs, which is one of RPA’s “sweet spots.” Smaller banks want the ability to handle mobile deposits; companies want to onboard customers remotely. While discretionary IT (information technology) spending will dip as a result of the pandemic, there is a surge of interest in RPA and intelligent automation.

The Scale Conundrum
As our experts discussed in the webinar, interest in RPA is high but scale remains a challenge. In fact, according to Forrester’s Q2 2019 Global Robotic Process Automation Services Forrester Wave™ Online Survey,  only 52% of firms using RPA have grown their digital workforce to more than 10 bots, illustrating the apparent difficulty of scaling.

So, this year's MQ is out. And guess what? Kryon is not on it. Why the hell not? The answer is simple. Kryon didn’t meet ONE of Gartner’s arcane and outdated selection criteria, which has nothing to do with the attributes that are most important to the enterprise community, like product innovation, service and customer value, and references, and everything to do with narrow-minded and obsolescent benchmarks. Gartner – get with the times! Not only have you done a severe injustice to vendors who have demonstrated a high impact on the market, but you have also misrepresented the RPA market and disserved Gartner clients.

Banks and financial institutions, like so many sectors of the economy, are still in the throes of managing the wave that seemed to crash overnight – COVID-19. At the same time, conversations are pivoting to emphasize restarting the economy. Banks, financial institutions, and insurance (BFSI) companies are managing a crush of customers who must delay mortgages and other payments, secure loans, and bank completely remotely. At the same, financial enterprises must handle internal changes and adjust business operations accordingly, from instituting new financial models to managing IT strains brought on by remote workers.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the ideal way to create dynamic virtual workforces that cut costs, boost operational efficiency, increase employee satisfaction, and deliver a superior customer experience.