Focus on self-learning

A study by NASSCOM and the Boston Consulting Group has identified eight technologies under the Future Skills, an industry initiative to get India accelerated on a journey to build its skills and become global hub for talent in the emerging technologies. These technologies that are poised to grow exponentially are Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data Analytics, 3D Printing, Cloud Computing, Social and Mobile. Of these, RPA is already a buzzword. According to UK-based HfS Research, the global market for RPA Software and Services is expected to grow at a CAGR of 36 per cent, to $1.2 billion by 2021 from $271 million in 2016. Ganesh Iyer, India CEO of Symphony Ventures, a global leader in RPA and Intelligent Automation, which was acquired by American BPO provider Sykes Enterprises last year, spoke to Mini Tejaswi of Financial Chronicle about the growth and adoption of RPA globally. Excerpts:

What is RPA, what kind of adoption you see for this platform?

Organisations of every kind have sets of repetitive tasks that need to be fulfilled. RPA or Robotic Process Automation addresses such repetitive tasks that maybe high-volume and highly transactional. For instance, insurance companies or banks process thousands or even millions of customer claims or account opening forms every day. This requires someone at the provider end to go through these forms and inputting data into IT systems, a process that is repetitive and rule-based. Due to advancing technology, these tasks, which were handled by humans, are now being taken over by software.

Global companies are at a fairly advanced stage in their automation journey and have been using RPA in some form or the other last 4-5 years. RPA is seeing deployment across all industries but especially so in sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, banking and insurance and telecom.

Automation brings in a fear of job loss. How can upskilling be of help in such scenario?

A couple of decades ago, people were worried about how increasing use of computers would render jobs obsolete. The reality is that as technologies evolve, people will have to upskill, adapt and evolve to stay relevant. The way forward is all about self-learning. Any new technology or development leads to an evolution of human skills. As technologies change, old skills become redundant and the people who cannot upskill will face concerns with the job security and their own career path.

Are Indian organizations using RPA yet?
The Indian market is at an inflexion point. BPOs and captive processing units are at an advanced stage when it comes to using RPA technologies but other Indian organizations are still doing pilots and small-scale implementations. The market here for RPA is broadly segmented into three: Large IT services organizations who are leveraging RPA to reduce costs of delivery and passing the benefits to their clients; captives of global companies that have grown by offering data-centric process management activities and now have to reduce costs and domestic firms that are still at the RPA POC (proof-of-concept) stage.