In its recent report on digital transformation technologies & services, entitled RPA and AI Technology Evaluation Market Assessment, NelsonHall examines how the automation market is evolving and changing, with a greater focus on cognitive automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

While rule-based robotic process automation (RPA) makes up the majority of current deployments, cognitive automation - in which the technology can reason through task exceptions as a human would - is growing swiftly, and will make up more than one-third of the automation market by 2020. Machine learning is expected to act as a significant acceleration factor in increasing the proportion of tasks that can be automated, as well as the proportion of task exceptions that can be handled by RPA/AI platforms.

One of the key trends highlighted in the research is the maturation of enterprise RPA initiatives from the 'press record and go' phase of RPA deployment, using process recording tools present in most vendors' products as an exploratory tool, toward the institution of automation centers of excellence and more structured implementation of RPA and AI. This trend is occurring in parallel with vendors beginning to focus more on security and scaleability of their solutions in recent software releases, suggesting that RPA implementation and deployment best practices are broadly maturing.

David Mayer, the report's author and Principal Research Analyst at NelsonHall, said: "We are progressing through phases of automation and cognition toward AI-enabled, enterprise-level digital task flow. By 2021, we expect that applications of RPA in the industry will 'lift off' from the current predominant L1 tasks and begin contributing substantively in L2 and L3 work. Meanwhile, deployments by industry will broaden to include more significant presence in telecoms, retail, travel and hospitality, manufacturing, and utilities."

RPA and AI Technology Evaluation Market Assessment is part of NelsonHall's Digital Transformation Technologies & Services program. For further information on the report and the program, contact Dave Mayer.