Francis Carden

Do you want to be a systems engineer (writing/supporting operating systems, rocket ships, new tools, AI, deep learning etc) or do you want to be “programming” (building) enterprise applications to support most businesses operations (HR, CRM, Finance, Insurance, Payroll)? Because there will be strong demand for the former but less and less demand for the latter. In the near term, “code” will less and less be necessary to build enterprise applications in what is termed this “model” application platform era (think lowcode/No Code). Coding user interfaces (UX) will die for these apps too as it’s rarely necessary. They can be generated (and should be) BUT having programming “thinking” to give you a programmers mindset, will be advantageous.

I think on this one, *IF* you have to ask this question, then turn to your competitors and/or peers because the horse is already out of the barn. There are already 1000's of use cases each with excitement and fear but this isn't one-stop-shop or one-trip-pony (sorry for all the metaphors) but what's important is you must get entrenched and keep up. If you blink, you'll miss it (oops, another)..

Uipath has some of the best learning programs, forums and a wide connected community that know bucket loads about their product. They are envied by many vendors here.

Fair to say, you can automate almost anything with Uipath since they have built and acquired a lot of surrounding technology. RPA as a tool, since it includes UI automation can effectively automate what a human can do - aka anything. Are all tools the same and perfect? No. Should you use API's if you can? Yes? It's a mix-match to suit you needs based on cost, savings and ultimately what your goals are.

Uipath has been a leader in RPA thanks to its marketing prowess, positioning and easy to learn technology. It is apparent now that many leading RPA technologies have become closer to each other and have similar strengths. It is imperative you try each RPA vendor against YOUR particular use cases, applications, goals and budgets. Just because Uipath has more competition now does not mean it's not right for you, but it really means, you should do you homework more wisely than ever. Too many do a few simple POC's to prove a product and get disappointed when they try the product further across their org and only then discover weaknesses.

Not sure the solution or correct term is actually tied to RPA at all. Sure, RPA vendors have cleverly and interestingly evolved some of the technology that this space needs and should be included in your evaluation. BUT you should look wider at OCR, AI (Gen AI, NLP) and Machine Learning vendors as many strong technologies are turning unstructured data into something very very consumable by RPA, lowcode, nocode, coding etc,. These are exciting times for unstructured data but also be aware, unless you know what's IN the data, don't even dare to send it to anywhere in the "public" domain. Also, think "responsible AI" too, lest your org gets caught up in being sued for bias etc., cause you interpret it wrong (or illegally).