AutomationAutomation Anywhere Imagine Review

We wanted to do a write up on our experience at Automation Anywhere’s Imagine Conference London 2019. This is the first of Automation Anywhere’s events that us at Edge Tech have attended and it did not disappoint!

We only went for one day, which was the Thursday, the day that we felt was the most jam packed in terms of talks and speakers who we wanted to see.

We arrived at 7:30am, just after registration opened, and were welcomed by the event staff, we proceeded to the breakfast area where we grabbed a couple of pastries and a coffee which we enjoyed before the first talk.

One of the first talks that we attended gave us a breakdown of Automation Anywhere’s platform, the picture below shows how their Digital Workforce is put together. A combination of Enterprise RPA + their IQ Bot (AI) + Bot Insight (Smart Analytics), when combined they make their Digital Workforce.

In the very same talk it was highlighted that Automation Anywhere recommend 3 approaches to Automation. These are;

Reagan approach – “Trust, but verify” – Focusing on one Department and a few processes but making sure they are digital end to end

Obama approach – “Yes we can” – Giving 50% of your workforce a “digital Colleague” to work alongside, encouraging them to automate their simple processes and focus on the difficult parts of their jobs

Martin Luther-King approach – “I have a dream” ­– Automation Anywhere state that the golden ration is 20% of your workforce being Digital – working on all processes across the transformation program

Automation Anywhere did state that the clients getting the most out of the system were people who were using two or more of these methods in tandem.

One topic which was highlighted was the fact that there are a number of new roles which are being created because of RPA such as, Process Designers, CoE Managers and RPA Support. There is a big stigma around ‘robots taking peoples jobs’ however we have seen that this isn’t true, the majority of people are working alongside RPA or being utilised in other areas of the business they work in. There hasn’t been much emphasis on the jobs which RPA creates, these positions did not exist 10 years ago but now we are starting to see more and more demand for these types of positions due to the uptake in RPA across the world.

Being at the forefront of recruitment campaigns it is really exciting to see these new jobs come to market and assisting businesses with the challenges they face when hiring someone who technically hasn’t held that job title before!

After the morning of various seminars/talks were completed, we took some time to have some lunch ahead of the keynote speeches which we were really looking forward to, by two very well-respected individuals in very different fields, Jeff Immelt, and Garry Kasparov.

Jeff Immelt, Former CEO of GE (General Electric) talked about being retired (but not really!), his experience with technology throughout his career and how he is an advocate for RPA and AI. Jeff also talked about not focusing on the big picture but to start small and work from there, something everyone in the space can relate to. One of the quotes which seemed to stick with everyone we spoke to after Jeff’s speech was “Find a way to break the rules without getting fired”. A comment which a lot of people can relate to and certainly made a few people in the audience laugh.

Garry Kasparov was the second keynote speaker, the former world chess champion talked about the future of human and robotic intelligence and how the world changes when machines outperform humans in learnable skills. The first time he lost in 12 years as the world chess champion was to IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997! He explained how annoyed he was that he lost to a machine, as you could imagine after 12 years undefeated however was keen to make sure everyone knew it was a rematch after he won the first game. It was a shock to find out that chess apps now, are incredibly more powerful than Deep Blue was. This was reiterated by Garry when he mentioned there is a long period of time where technology is much less powerful than human capability, then there is a very small period where humans and technology can compete, like Garry did with Deep Blue, then there is an exponential curve where technology far surpasses human ability. It was inspiring listening to someone who was a master in their field and how he has seen technology develop from a different perspective.

Overall the day and event was great to be a part of, Automation Anywhere really pulled out the stops with the venue, content and speakers. We will certainly be attending their event in London in 2020, it will be exciting to see what changes in the matter of a year and if they can top 2019!