2023 Intelligent Automation and RPA Outlook

2022 was an exciting and eventful year for the RPA and intelligent automation (IA) sector, especially when it came to mergers and acquisitions. As documented on our website, over 17 M&A deals took place during the first 8 months of 2022 on top of at least 5 major ones that took place in 2021. This M&A activity has irrevocably changed the RPA vendor landscape, maturing a diverse, start-up rich market into one dominated by 5 five “mega-vendors.”  

One factor driving these transactions are IA and RPA’s soaring adoption rates despite some of the skepticism surrounding these solutions, especially when it comes to scalability. In fact, experts predict the RPA market will grow to $20.1 billion by 2030 and our findings more or less confirm these projection.

While in 2021, only 30% of respondents were actively investing in IA and RPA, 64% of our respondents said they had already invested in intelligent automation and 42% said they are currently investing in RPA. Looking forward to 2023, an additional 35% said they planned to adopt intelligent automation with 54% saying they planned to invest in RPA.

Though more people may be adopting and reaping the rewards of RPA and intelligent automation, that does not necessarily mean that everyone’s budgets are increasing. In fact, budgets seem to have plateaued, probably in response to ongoing economic uncertainty.

In addition, while recent advancements in enabling technology such as AI, process discovery and low code make RPA success more achievable than ever, the technology is not without its limitations. As mentioned before, RPA can be difficult to scale as well as expensive and brittle, requiring ongoing maintenance.

As such, only 49% of respondents expect their intelligent automation budgets to increase in 2023 vs. 53% heading into 2022. At 40%, the percent of respondents who expect their RPA budgets has remained entirely the same over the past year.

As for execution, we also saw a rather dramatic increase in the implementation of automation center of excellences (CoEs). While in 2021, only 54% of respondents had implemented an automation CoE, this year 72% of respondents said they already had one in place (chart 9). This proves that organizations are getting serious about business process automation and building out the organizational infrastructure in order to support these objectives.

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