GenAI has led to bigger contract gains: Automation Anywhere CTO

The advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has turned out to be one of the significant points of inflection for US-based Automation Anywhere. Started as a robotic process automation (RPA) company in 2003, Automation Anywhere wants to now rebrand its offerings to ‘Intelligent Automation (IA)’, which essentially involves weaving in GenAI in its services and solutions. Both RPA and IA are strictly rule-based and ideal for well-defined, highly structured processes.

“We are at the generation 3 (Gen 3) of automation. We started with RPA, then six years back we began leveraging AI with automation, and in Gen 3 we have RPA with AI and GenAI,” said Prince Kohli, the chief technology officer (CTO). To be sure, RPA is a business automation process, that took wings from the turn of last decade and involves using software to perform repetitive tasks like extracting data, filling out forms, and moving files.

Kohli added that it such a pivot has also resulted in favourable business outcomes for its customers, helping them ‘go from saving millions of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars’. “Customers, for the need of enhanced productivity and resiliency, have rapidly adopted GenAI technologies. This has also led to more substantial contracts, allowing us to address a broader range of customer needs and making the overall deals much larger.”

The company serves various industries such as supply chain, healthcare, retail, energy. However, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) is the largest and fastest growing industry for the company. It counts companies such as Axis Bank, IDFC Bank, Indian Oil Corporation, and Adani Group. Region-wise, US is the largest market for the company, along with India being one of the fastest growing. Notably, India houses 70% of the total workforce of the company, spread across its offices in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Vadodara.

At its recently concluded annual event ‘Imagine 2024’, the company launched the AI + Automation Enterprise System platform. It offers AI agents that uses enterprise data to make decisions and take action across any enterprise system of record. It is expected to assuage customers’ rising concerns on productivity.

“For us, it became immediately clear (during client conversations) that customers across various regions and industries have noticed a plateau in productivity. Historically, employee productivity had been rising for various reasons, but over the past 10-15 years, this growth has flattened,” said Kohli.

“Despite continued investments, companies are not seeing increased returns, creating a significant drag on the economy. This issue is further exacerbated by declining populations in many countries, increasing the pressure to achieve more with the same or fewer people. Consequently, everyone is looking to GenAI as a solution to break this deadlock. Already, businesses are observing positive impacts on both their bottom lines and top lines due to GenAI-driven productivity gains.”

Kohli is also the part of Ethical AI Governance Group, a network of companies, venture capitals (VCs), experts and practitioners who promote ethical and responsible use of AI. “As part of the group, we work across many startups, where they talk about what they have built, publish papers, build strong ecosystem in US and europe. We acquaint them with the new AI advances and associated risks, while also encouraging them to have an AI mandate from the early stage itself,” Kohli concluded.