Forrester Report - Predictions 2021 - Automation

Predictions 2021: Automation
October 22nd, 2020 | Craig Le Clair, Charlie Dai, J. P. Gownder, George Lawrie, Diego Lo Giudice,
Bernhard Schaffrik with Glenn O’Donnell, Amanda Lipson
At A Glance
• Business and technology leaders interested in the impact of the pandemic on automation
should read our predictions for 2021.
• The “great lockdown” of 2020 will make the drive for automation in 2021 both inevitable and
irreversible.
• Remote work, new digital muscles, and pandemic constraints will create millions of pragmatic
automations in 2021; document extraction, RPA from anywhere, drones, and various employee
robots will proliferate; and, as expected, the mad dash to automate will bring trouble.
• For further information and guidance, schedule an inquiry.
The Pandemic Aims Automation At The Employee Experience

Automation has developed gradually over many decades and is now a top priority. In 2021, digital
transformation at more than three-quarters of enterprises will focus on automation, whether that’s for
core records, customer operations, or engagement. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), changes
to work patterns as a result of the pandemic, and a fierce global recession have made this drive for
automation inevitable — and irreversible.
• A fifth of enterprises will expand investment in intelligent document extraction. Intelligent

document extraction platform (IDEP) opportunities are heating up. Cubicle workers, coordinators,
and lower-level knowledge workers can no longer push papers around the office, as they’re
working from home. Even before the pandemic, IDEP saw strong investment as firms wanted
to use it to classify documents by customer, topic, or security and compliance risk as well as
for eDiscovery, contract analytics, email, and forms use cases. Combining computer vision with
advances in machine learning has made solutions more valuable and easier to build and maintain.
Enterprises can compare intelligent automation, public cloud, and text analytics platform options
from independent software vendors.
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Predictions 2021: Automation October 22nd, 2020
• A notable failure will occur as a result of the rush to automation. The pandemic accelerated
investment in various forms of business process and IT automation. Two-thirds of enterprise
organizations that encountered broken processes during the pandemic were pressured to patch in
automation solutions.(1) But rushed and haphazard automation exposes systems and the business
to serious risk, so the lack of focus on automation quality is alarming. It can lead to monumental
failures that not only damage a company’s reputation and customer trust but also limit broader
public trust in automation (specifically AI) as a result of media scrutiny. In 2021, up to 30% of
organizations will ramp up their focus on quality by better planning and testing automation before
deploying it to production or exposing it to employees.
• Intelligent automation suites will provide a quarter of all RPA solutions. Commoditization,
major enterprise software acquisitions, new entrants, specialization, and public market ambitions
are resulting in a diverse robotic process automation (RPA) market. Like machine learning, RPA
will become an embedded feature of many platforms by the end of 2021. While significant market
share will accrue to three alpha pure-play and 15 tier two providers, RPA will be available from
almost 200 software workflow transformation solution vendors. Enterprises should look at their
overall strategic and tactical automation ambitions, organizational structure, existing investments,
business process maturity, and central automation teams before considering further RPA
investments.
• A fifth of enterprises will use commercial drones to automate business operations. Recent
rapid growth in the consumer drones industry has sparked momentum in the commercial drone
market. In 2019, 12% of global infrastructure decision-makers said that their firm owns or leases
drones.(2) Commercial drone registration took off in the US and in China, as over 1,300 drone
manufacturers produced and registered more than 330,000 drones. While social distancing is a
factor in drone usage, two forces will accelerate adoption in 2021. First, governments are crafting
better regulations to facilitate drone adoption and commercialization, with Amazon Prime Air
gaining FAA approval for drone deliveries and India driving drone pilot training with new policies.
Second, the rapid evolution of computer vision and 5G will enable real-time drone intelligence over
ultrareliable, low-latency communications.
• Intelligent automation will advance to support one in four home workers.(3) Work has changed
forever. Three times as many information workers will work from home all or most of the time,
while many companies will institute hybrid models in which workers come to the office less often.
Walking over to the IT department for troubleshooting help, to the HR department for assistance
with benefits, or to junior staff for administrative support will be harder. As a result of the pandemic,
new forms of automation will support one in four remote workers either directly or indirectly by
2022. Direct support in the form of giving a bot to individual workers to support their daily journey
will be rare. But indirect support will blossom, as intelligent automation handles employee benefits
questions and supports document, customer service, and line-of-business tasks that are often
invisible to the home worker.
© 2020 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378 2
Predictions 2021: Automation October 22nd, 2020
Sources:
(1) Forrester’s Q1 2020 Global Digital Process Automation Survey.
(2) Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics® Infrastructure Survey, 2019.
(3) We predict that 21% of global information workers will work from home most or all of the time by
the end of 2021.
Related Resource
Intelligent Automation Will Push Organizations Flat, Wide, And Anxious
© 2020 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378 3

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Predictions 2021: Automation

• For further information and guidance, schedule an inquiry.

The Pandemic Aims Automation At The Employee Experience

• A fifth of enterprises will expand investment in intelligent document extraction. Intelligent

Forrester Research, Inc., 60 Acorn Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA

(2) Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics® Infrastructure Survey, 2019.

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