Coming from a startup background, we lack a formal administrative structure. This means we operate without established procedures and often tackle daily tasks, such as Excel updates or attendance tracking, on an ad-hoc basis. To address these challenges, we develop internal proofs of concept and present them to clients. In my previous role, I automated approximately ten web- and Excel-based processes using Automation Anywhere.

We implemented Automation Anywhere to address the challenge of manually entering data, such as transferring thousands of rows from Excel to a web application. When performed manually at a rate of 200 records per day, this process typically takes five days. By utilizing RPA technology, we can drastically reduce this timeframe to a matter of hours. Our primary goal is to minimize labor hours and enhance efficiency, enabling employees to focus on higher-value tasks like logic and content development instead of repetitive data entry.

The generative AI is helpful for jobs that fail. It will try to redo the same operation by implementing different numbers, and if it succeeds, it will automatically continue the process.

The task process, before and after Automation Anywhere, requires a series of actions performed by either a human or a bot. Previously, without automation, the process was identical. Rather than having employees sit at computers inputting the same data daily, automation allows for their redeployment to other areas such as administration, cash flow management, or payments. The goal of RPA is not job elimination but to enhance efficiency. While automation platforms can handle many tasks, they are not infallible and require human oversight. Regular maintenance and monitoring are essential for any automated process.

The initial learning curve for Automation Anywhere will be challenging because the drag-and-drop interface differs significantly from traditional coding. While packages are used, the underlying logic is expressed visually rather than textually. This transition may take one to two months as users acclimate to the new terminology and approach. Once familiar with the platform, developers will find it easier to construct automation processes due to their existing programming knowledge, which includes concepts like string operations, conditions, loops, and other programming language constructs. Although the terminology will be unfamiliar, the underlying logic remains consistent, making the platform more accessible over time.

The training takes at least four months for technical employees to learn, understand, and implement what they learn.

Automation Copilot is a valuable tool for streamlining daily tasks, but human oversight is essential during execution. For instance, if a sales representative quotes a package requiring managerial approval in a tourism scenario, the process should automatically route to the manager for confirmation via email, message, or another preferred method. While Automation Copilot is beneficial, it's crucial to incorporate a mechanism within the process to handle this manual intervention.

Organizations can benefit from Automation Anywhere's document, web, and Excel automation capabilities.

Automation and AI used to be a frightening prospect for our clients, who feared job displacement. However, they have embraced the idea after experiencing how these technologies can free up their time for more critical tasks.

Our organization has integrated Automation Anywhere with Epicor, Aurora, Dynamic 365, SAP, and Power BI.

Due to the numerous internal teams and domains, Automation Anywhere has been implemented across various IT departments within our organization. Multiple processes within each team have been automated using Automation Anywhere, from account management to application maintenance. These automated processes often involve handling documents, APIs, Excel files, or web-based interactions.

The most valuable feature is the back-end process automation. I primarily encountered this issue in back-end operations. To illustrate, consider the medical industry where I previously worked. ICD codes, a critical component, must be mapped by the administrative department. Traditionally, reconciling a single report was a manual, ten-hour task. Automation Anywhere offers a clear advantage over other market solutions by streamlining these time-consuming back-end processes.

Although the UI and elements are user-friendly, it is still difficult for business users without experience to understand how to use Automation Anywhere.

Automation Copilot has generated a strong foundation, but its analytics capabilities lag behind competitors. While Automation Anywhere offers numerous built-in dashboards, its data visualization options are limited. In contrast, Microsoft Power Automate provides extensive data manipulation and visualization flexibility, allowing users to create various chart types and formats. To remain competitive, Automation Anywhere must significantly enhance its data visualization features.

Licensing fees could be a barrier to entry for many potential customers interested in using Automation Anywhere.

A major drawback of Automation Anywhere is the lack of notification for all customers when upgrades occur. Without any information about these upgrades, it is difficult to determine specific details.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for five years.

I contacted technical support for problems related to the in-progress tab. In 2021 or 2022, numerous tasks appeared in the in-progress tab despite not running on the machines in real time. This led to the development of an API to address the issue. However, a new problem arose: when triggering the bot on runner machines, the bot was not actually triggered on those machines, yet it still appeared in the in-progress tab. This discrepancy persisted despite multiple reports, but the issue was resolved recently.

Neutral

The initial deployment is straightforward.

BotCity is a newcomer to the RPA market, currently holding ninth place on the top ten list. They are rapidly expanding and offer a unique advantage: no additional software is needed as long as the system supports Python.

I would rate Automation Anywhere seven out of ten.

Maintenance is required for server-based environments but not for cloud-based architectures since Automation Anywhere is self-hosted and managed by them.

We are using Automation Anywhere to automate our reports. We are an insurance firm, so we need to ensure that we send out notifications to our customers day to day to announce when premiums are due and so on. We're automating the process so that, rather than sending out manual messages to customers, we can automate these messages. 

We were manually tracking all the premiums and all payments that are due from customers and so on. Now, with Automation Anywhere, at least every month, on a certain date, we have the pre-trained notifications being sent out to customers. It's saving us time.

Before the installation, we had a manual process for notifying customers. We'd have to get an excerpt out of the system, get a CSV file, then have someone look at it, and manually filter, for example, what are the due amounts, et cetera. So all these processes have been automated now from our side.

Automating the entire process for us has been extremely beneficial. Earlier there had to be proper dedicated resources who had to take a report and so on, and it would take a lot of time. Our resource utilization has gone down drastically for this activity now.

It is kind of difficult for business users to use the product. In our case, we didn't really have any in house team who were able to process the mapping and everything. Now this is done by Automation Anywhere.

Being the end user, we didn't really have to get into a learning curve as such since our vendor partners were able to map everything for us as per our requirements. There was not much training that we had to do.

We have Oracle Finance incorporated with the solution. It's pulling our data directly for us. We do not have many use cases are in the inline environment. 

Automation Anywhere helped save time and costs. In our scenario, it has drastically helped us as there used to be a proper dedicated team who had to do these manual activities. That has been cut down, and the system is taking care of everything for us. 

Applications like Microsoft Power Automate do have zero-code systems. I've not done much research on Automtin Anywhere in comparison. However, if Automation Anywhere could also have something of that sort, that would be a game changer. I see that Microsoft has already added all sorts of AI capabilities that can support users who are trying to automate any process—including building reports. That will eventually help a lot. 

We've been using the solution for over three years now.

So far, we have not faced any issues. 

We only use the solution in our finance department. For us, the solution is scalable enough. I'd rate scalability seven or eight out of ten.

I'm not really raising any tickets with technical support.

We did not previously use a different solution.

I wasn't involved in the deployment of the solution. 

We do not really have any maintenance. 

The pricing is still pretty high. If I have to consider Power Automate from Microsoft, I have to consider that that application is covered in my Microsoft licenses, and that would still save me a good amount of money.

We didn't evaluate other options. 

We don't use any AI yet. Generative AI is something that management is still not really keen on focusing Automation Anywhere on. As AI advances, there might be some initiatives that might be pushed down from the CEO side. So far it's tough to pick up as AI is still at a very early stage from a use case standpoint for insurance. If there are some tools that are coming into play, we will then consider investing in them and maybe try to incorporate them in our current setup.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Gping with Automation Anywhere was an organizational decision. However, Power Automate would also do the job for most companies. If cost is a concern, users can still go with Power Automate under a Microsoft license. 

We set up a bot that works on the billing system. It uses RPA and generative AI to analyze the contracts of our B2B customers and check information in the IT systems, CRM, billing, etc. We compare and correct an invoice before it's automated to avoid wrong entries for our customers.

We run 14 projects in parallel, generating revenue efficiency, improving customer experience, and saving millions of dollars. Automation Anywhere affects the center of the business. 

In one case, we reduced the time spent on a task from 30 minutes to one minute. Before Automation Anywhere, we used to perform the tasks manually. These tasks account for 20 to 30 percent of the total. We can perform all these tasks in Automation Anywhere much faster than the old process. The tasks are fully automated. It's critical. We don't have more customer complaints about the wrong invoice in the B2B market.

Automation Anywhere's Pathfinder program has supported us to evaluate the maturity of our Center of Excellence.

It was easy to use Automation Anywhere's RPA through API connections, and it works well. It's easy for non-technical users to learn to use Automation Anywhere. We just finished teaching our telecom company last week with Automation Anywhere to democratize the solution. We made a bot for the company to give them the power of RPA and artificial intelligence. They love the tool. It's easy and low-code. I think it will be easy to do citizen development.

Our developers find Automation Anywhere's learning curve to be extremely short. We have good developers who can learn automation anywhere quickly. We have integrated AA with CRM, billing systems, external databases, and websites. It's easy to integrate because there are so many ready-made automations that you don't need to build. It's easy and fast.

Automation Anywhere could improve its integration with Python and other programming languages.

We started using Automation Anywhere last year and, from August to September, created a center of excellence in automation and AI. 

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10 for stability. It's highly stable compared to other automation platforms. 

I work for a global enterprise, so they innovate fast. Automation and generative AI scales up incredibly quickly.

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of 10. They respond quickly and know what they're doing. We have a close relationship with our account manager and technical support. This relationship makes the difference.

Positive

We tried UiPath and Blue Prism before deciding on Automation Anywhere. We chose Automation Aware because of its support, which was better than that of other enterprises.

It's easy to deploy, install, and learn Automation Anywhere. We deployed it ourselves without the help of any integrators.

The pricing is comparable to other enterprise solutions in Brazil, such as UiPath and Blue Prism. The setup cost is nothing because we deploy it in the cloud. The licensing model isn't too difficult to understand like other solutions. 

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10. My favorite part of the Imagine Conference is the hands-on labs. They were impressive. Using generative AI and automation, I made a bot in three minutes. It's my first time here at Imagine, and it's a well-organized event with good information for automation customers. 

I would encourage people to come to the conference to build good relationships and network with peers. The technology you acquire here is crucial. 

Jersey STEM is an all-volunteer organization, which means that we have interns doing development using donated systems. The beauty of donated systems is they're free. The challenge of donated systems is that there's a lot of data that isn't correlated, and the systems don't talk to each other, so we use RPA to establish some communication between the systems and gather data into a central coherent location.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization by giving us a relatively easy way to gather all the data we need. We have data from HR, volunteer-matching systems, and grants systems. Automation Anywhere has enabled us to automate data gathering and posting that data into usable forms.

Before implementing Automation Anywhere, we processed these tasks manually by getting data from websites, putting them into spreadsheets, and going from spreadsheets to databases. Attempts to automate that using other tools were pretty onerous. 

Automation Anywhere enables us to simplify the process and see results much faster. Previously, it would take six to eight weeks to get results. With Automation Anywhere, we're getting results in two to four weeks, which makes the business happy. When I say business, I must remind you that these are all volunteers with little time on their hands. They're doing this with full-time jobs. Our goal is to make their lives easier with Automation Anywhere.

Jersey STEM primarily uses Google, so we use tools like Google Sheets and Google Docs. The automations all have to do with the Google ecosystem. Additionally, we must integrate with all donated systems, including HR, volunteer-matching, and grant systems that are donated to us. Jersey STEM is building the data warehouse as we gather all that data.

In a volunteer organization, employee capacity and compliance are not the primary metrics. Because we have an all-volunteer crew, we don't have them eight hours a day. We only have them for a couple of hours a day. We want to do anything we can to better utilize those two hours a day so that they're not spending them moving data around in spreadsheets. 

I have some metrics at the top of my head, but they're a little abstract. Accomplishing what we've done so far with the bots in production would take 40,000. It's not a direct correlation of full-time employees because that's all work that would not have gotten done because they don't have time for that kind of nitty-gritty work. 

Automation Anywhere has saved us a lot of time but not so much cost because everything is donated. If you have volunteers and they're giving you two hours a day, it is better to spend time on intellectual work rather than repetitive mundane work. That's the big bang that Automation Anywhere gives us.

Automation Anywhere's ease of use is the most valuable feature. We have interns doing RPA development, and it takes them about four weeks to get advanced-level certification. And within four weeks, they're productive. It's user and developer-friendly, robust, and scalable. We started in March with four bots in production. We have four more bots about to go online, which is pretty quick in the RPA world.

At Jersey STEM, we haven't put Automation Anywhere directly in front of business users. We don't have citizen developers because most processes we tackle are back-office automations. In the fullness of time, we will put citizen developers to work. I'm confident they will pick it up fast because Automation Anywhere does a great job of simplifying the process of building automations.

The learning curve for Automation Anywhere is quite simple. I had four interns do some basic training online. We did a three-day course with them to get them the advanced training, and they were productive within four weeks. They are in the process of building more bots. At this stage, we may be in danger of having them run out of work because they're working so fast.

Integration is the primary reason that Automation Anywhere process-building is so simple. All the building blocks are handed to us. It removes the guesswork of what has to be connected to where. We can pay more attention to the logic of the process rather than the mechanics and infrastructure of the process.

The only thing I would advocate for is making Automation Anywhere's developer environment Mac-enabled because many of our graduate students are coming out of school with Macs. Everything else in the Automation Anywhere world is built for Windows.

We've only been using Automation Anywhere at Jersey STEM since March of this year.

Automation Anywhere has been rock solid for us. We have had no issues.

We have yet to find out the limits of Automation Anywhere's scalability because we're only starting. We have a control room with one attended bot runner. I can imagine that within the next year or two, we'll need to scale up. Given the way Automation Anywhere is architected, I am confident that scaling up won't be a problem. 

Deploying Automation Anywhere was relatively seamless. I've been using Automation Anywhere since version 10 and was a solution architect for version 10 and version 11. An on-prem deployment requires a computer science degree to understand because there are so many factors involved. With a cloud deployment, everything was done for me. The only thing I had to do was provisioning and configuration. It made life a lot easier. I could complete it on my own in about two weeks.

It's too early, but the ROI will not be measured in dollars and cents. It will be measured in our ability to get data faster. For example, if we have a base of volunteers waiting to connect with us, we can connect with them much faster. If there are grants to be had, we can get to those grants a lot faster. 

The difference between a volunteer organization and a typical business organization is that our funding has to come from outside. We have to find it. Help comes from outside. We have to find it. The return on investment is getting there quicker.

We purchase Automation Anywhere through a service partner that's also helping us with those costs.

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10. It's a solid nine and a half because I don't give out tens. 

The Imagine event has been highly informative and useful for me. It's informative because I'm learning all about the generative AI coming down. That's been the focus. It's useful in that I've made lots of connections this year. When folks find out about Jersey STEM's goal, they're interested in volunteering. I have a whole bunch of new people to talk to who will help us with our future endeavors.

The Imagine experience is a full-on fire hose of automation, but it's a lot of fun. All the presentations have been geared to keep people's attention and to be entertaining. It's a brave new world, and there's a wow factor here.

I would invite folks in my field and other volunteers. It would be self-serving because our volunteers would make more connections, get more people to help, and also learn about the possibilities of where we could take Jersey STEM from a data infrastructure perspective.

We have a pretty big shop nowadays. We have 324 automations in production. Our use cases were concentrated on loan services. Most recently, our initiatives have been targeted in the control space - automating the things that make the bank go around and seeing that the bank is in a good position every day. 

We have a backlog in the hundreds, automation is not something that we'll finish anytime soon. It's definitely a marathon to finish all the things that we need to do.

In 2017, there was a lot of hype around RPA. They paved the way for us to see those benefits, and we continue to grow every year. 

In those early days, we had 28 automations in our first year. We thought we were pretty proud of that number. In 2023, we created over 100 automations in a single year and moved those to production. The volume and the increased capacity for our businesses improved. The employee engagement, when we talk about bots now, is much better. It's "how can we help?" There are no real concerns of "They're going to replace our jobs." Over seven years, our automations have grown, and we've matured with them. 

There are several aspects that we value. The control rooms, monitoring the performance, and making sure everything is up and running has been a great feature. From the design and capacity of the developers' perspective, the intuitive interface is excellent. It's a workflow-driven design session. Following the flow of the users alongside the code makes for an easy automation that everyone can understand.

Automation Anywhere brings in and changes the way we do process automation. Everything was very manual beforehand. We'd have to do batch processes where integrations of systems were pretty costly and took a lot of time. Mapping database fields from screens down to the next system was more difficult versus with Automation Anywhere, you get the visual input of the screens. You can click on those fields and not have to do the data mapping or extract them. You can correlate them to other systems almost instantly individually. 

Automation Anywhere is easy to pick up for business users. Initially, we trained 45 people. Whoever raised their hands, we said, "We'll train you." About 65% of those initial trainees were from the business side. A couple of years later, we noticed that the people who created the automation did really well. They were receiving promotions. Then, all of a sudden, we didn't have the people to support our automation needs since those original trainees moved up. We made a shift and said, "Hey, business users, you want to come to technology? We're going to centralize development." 13 said yes, and we kept building out. Now we're a team that's 40-strong.

The learning curve is pretty quick. Automation Anywhere provides a lot of training courses to support you and there are individuals assigned to your account. The learning curve is short from our standpoint. We spend two weeks with anyone who comes in, whether they're a previous developer or a business person. We find that simple automations can be completed within that training period. Within six months, some of the most complex items people are able to handle.

Right now, our 324 automations touch around 120 different systems. Our core platforms are integrated. APIs are being used for SharePoint or imaging systems so  thatwe don't really have a reliance on the UI. With the integrations, we just continue to grow. 

The integration of Automation Anywhere into our workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents is great. There are several phases to this one. Automation Anywhere, just the design, the tool, allows you to jump in with workflows initially and lay out the complete automation, and then you can get into the details. For us, it's particularly powerful as it aligns with the different systems that we work with, as well as providing connectivity to the underlying systems, seeing the screens to get into the details of that workflow, making for a great design process for our automation.

Our automation program has positively affected our business in terms of employee capacity and compliance. It's affected all areas. When we think of the capacity, I can go back to 2020 in the early days of COVID and with a payment protection program specifically. We had 9,000 tellers who no longer were going into the bank. We pivoted to an SBA program and had those 9,000 tellers calling a variety of small businesses. We still needed 1,000 more people to do the due diligence. That's where RPA shined. We were able to fill that capacity gap and immediately become one of the top three players in the space. 

When I think of just day-to-day employee engagement, we're focused on the controls of the bank. Those happen maybe once a month, once a quarter, once a year. So those are activities that you really have to prep for and document really well. RPA does the same thing over and over really well, and those controls are assured to be done and executed in the same fashion over and over.

Automation Anywhere has helped us save on both time and cost. When we think of we run around 750,000 hours of runtime on bots per year. That would be a significant amount of employees. That's about 450 to 500 employees' worth of work done every day. Just the overall capacity provided by automation would be hard to replace.

Automation Anywhere's ability to provide Automation at scale is impressive. We've obviously pushed that limit. We're at 324 automations. That's over 4200 tasks executed every day. From a scale and monitoring perspective, we know which bots are running, which ones may be going slow, and which didn't run. The ability of the control with room to monitor allows us to jump in and help out when necessary. That is paramount to our success. 

Automation Anywhere helps us find value. We do use professional services from time to time to augment both our capacity and capabilities while finding new ways of doing things. This is a very fast-moving environment. The things that we did five years ago are gone. We threw them away. We upgraded to new versions and have new capabilities. Keeping up with the latest and greatest is always a challenge. There are also new ways of development and sharing those findings, whether it's a webcast or part of the Pathfinder program; we're always curious about what's next with the product.

The tools are fundamentally solid. However, when I think of self-healing, such as automation with a new prompt or a new Windows patch occurring, being able to handle those kinds of things on top of what Automation Anywhere already does and that automatically click through and do the reboots that are necessary to just have a clean run would be ideal. That way, no one has to wake up in the middle of the night and adjust something. That would be amazing. 

Our company has been using Automation Anywhere for seven years. I've been using Automation Anywhere since 2017.

From a stability perspective, whether it's servers or virtual desktops with agents, we have very few issues. We have multiple servers and have never experienced downtime. We have had one or two nodes go down based on hardware issues, however, it's resilient. 

We're now at 324 automations, and it definitely scales. The screens prioritize things, and you have dashboards that say what's working and what isn't. Those types of activities help drive us to where the problems are and show us what we need to resolve them.

Technical support is solid. We pick up the phone and call and create tickets. We get responses almost instantly. We've had many nights trying to figure out how things work on our network or looking at logs. They've been great about jumping in any time we've asked for help. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

Throughout the history of development, people have tried to automate things. We've never used a tool that had the control room and the features, the scheduling, and the complexity that it could handle. When Automation Anywhere packaged the whole bundle together, that was the differentiator that really drove us to it.

When we think of ETL, all the standard tools, whether it's SQL or Oracle, we still have all those. However, for speed and simplicity and getting things to production fast, we'll leverage Automation Anywhere.

Many other options often require a data expert. You have to go to database tables to do automation or ETL-type activities, and you have to schedule that and know if there are conflicts within other systems. Plus, if there's downtime, you may not be able to run pieces. It's true coding. There is testing that's also required and the delivery time is not measured in weeks. It's measured in months. We'd all like everything to integrate seamlessly. That said, the real world comes into play, and I'm glad we have Automation Anywhere to fill everything out. 

Setup for us was probably the longest lead time. We're a bank, so we always have to scan the code base. We want to jump in, understand the connectivity, and understand how things are going to happen. There are a lot of planning-type activities before the install. We started in 2017 with version seven of Automation Anywhere. We went through version ten, then moved on to the A360. Each experience became better and better.

We have a PCI-compliant installation as well as our normal normal network.

Our experience deploying Automation Anywhere was seamless. From a server perspective, we run about a dozen servers in four dev IT QB production environments. We'll continue to do the first servers in dev and move to migrate them all the way through production. For any issues that we have along the way, customer service is right there with us to troubleshoot.

We've seen an ROI via hard saves. We define a hard save as someone having to leave the bank or a contract has to leave. We are net positive in our spend. We've managed to prioritize the highest use cases from a cost-saving perspective.

We find it comparable to other products out there. I wouldn't say huge differentiators from that perspective. 

We looked at autoIT to look at for specialty use cases. 

The very first bot that was rolled out was on my team. I've been able to see the control room and the code in progress and evolve over the years has been a pleasure. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

From an RPA perspective, it has all the core functionality. We can automate the bank's systems. The reliability, performance monitoring, and development time are excellent. In 2017, it used to take us six to nine months to develop. That was slow. Fast-forward to 2024, and it takes six weeks, plus or minus two weeks depending on complexity, to deliver an automation. 

We were in finance before, so all of our use cases have been in finance. Recently, we have grown out to IT. Our use cases now encompass HR, IT, legal, and everything that we can.

There have been numerous improvements in the organization. We have saved hours and time and hard dollars. In the first year, we saved over half a million dollars. That was about six months of time. After that, we have done at least three million year over year, and we have increased that very much. As far as time saved, it is well over 10,000 hours in the first year alone, and we continue to grow. This year, we are projecting 30,000 manual hours saved.

Prior to the implementation of Automation Anywhere, we had lots and lots of manual work. People would go into Excel and copy data from one master sheet to many sheets. They would compile data. They would take lots of time to do these things. Today, they can go in, press a button, and launch it. They can download hundreds and thousands of invoices, whereas previously, they used to do it manually. One of our use cases saved two people four days a week of time, which is 32 hours each. We now do that automatically in six hours.

The learning curve is initially a little daunting, but after you are in there and you understand how it works, it is very seamless. It is very easy to pick up and very intuitive, and then from there, it is pretty much you go and get your hands dirty.

The tools that we integrate with Automation Anywhere so far have been Python scripts and PowerShell. We have got Power Automate and Power Flows from Microsoft. We are starting to do some cognitive RPA. We are implementing OpenAI through Azure. We have got a lot of that going right now.

The integration with all of the documents and APIs is very seamless. There are packages available in the store if you do not have the integration built-in out of the box. They are available to everyone. Everything that we have been able to use has been just drag and drop. We can just pop in our credentials and be done.

Automation Anywhere has affected us in a positive way in terms of employee capacity and compliance. We have not had to backfill roles. We have not necessarily replaced people, and that is by intent. We did not want to replace people, but we also did not want to have to backfill people. We wanted people to focus on things that they value and be more productive instead of doing mind-numbing things that get no value, but they just have to do it.

Our time and cost savings have been immense since the beginning. In our first year, after we started launching the bots in June or July of 2019, we saved half a million dollars and 10,000 man-hours. Since then, we have grown more than 70% year over year. This year, we are on track to go up to about 40,000 man-hours saved and more than three million hard dollars saved.

They have been able to provide automation at scale pretty well. We fired up and started off with only three production machines. We are now up at five. Officially, we were going up to seven as of next week. We have heard about people here at the Imagine conference who, for example, have hundreds, so the point is proven, and the facts are there. They can scale up very quickly.

The main Automation Anywhere Program offering we use is Pathfinder. We have not utilized our partner services or anything like that, but Pathfinder has been great. Their user groups have been great. To be able to focus and see the product launches beforehand has always been advantageous. The ability to see that has been good.

The features that we found most valuable have been just automating manual processes. We are able to integrate and work with applications that users typically work with. That has been the best feature for us right now. 

Some of the biggest improvements they can make are with the interface. It can be improved in terms of usability or searching for something. For example, icons are hard to find. Typically, you jump into the search box, but being able to go in and find things quickly with the eye could be very valuable.

We have been using Automation Anywhere since 2019. It has been five years.

The stability of the solution has been great so far. It has been very resilient. Obviously, it depends on how you build it. You can obviously make a bad solution and it is going to be bad, but the uptime has been amazing. We have not had any issues with the cloud service since we moved to A360. It has been great since then.

I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten. There is some room for improvement. A lot of that depends on who you talk to. You have a great person and you have a not-so-great person. 

On the client support, so far, their service has been a ten out of ten. We have had amazing reps who I have worked with, and I have nothing bad to say about them.

I did not use a similar solution previously.

We use a mix of on-prem and cloud devices. We are exploring Microsoft Azure to go to it soon, but we are not using it today.

The deployment experience was a little bit frustrating at first, but I was not the one involved. Our architects were having issues, but we engaged with the Automation Anywhere solutions engineers. We were on the phone for maybe an hour or two hours and they fixed it. The deployment was great.

Our ROI is time saved and money saved. This has just been massive, and we continue to grow. We will be growing in the future, especially after this year.

There has been a half-million-dollar return on investment in the first six months alone. We will be up to three million this year. That is our projection, and I think we are going to exceed that.

The evaluation was done before I got here, but I know the company did evaluate UiPath, Blue Prism, Kofax, and a few others. They evaluated the top Gartner Quadrant applications.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event is being able to see what other customers are doing, not just networking but seeing the presentations, the breakout sessions, and seeing how other companies are doing the same challenges and maybe way better. It is a good time to go and reach out and ask them how they are doing something or how they are scaling up. For example, one company here has managed to scale up to more than 800 bots. They do something with Azure where they turn on a machine, and it is very cost-effective. That is solving some of the problems that we have.

The Imagine experience has been great. This is my second year here. It has been fun. It is helpful to learn. We have done a lot, so I really enjoyed the entire experience.

I got one of my direct reports here for the first time this year. Some of the things or the reasons I did tell him to come were:

• Being able to network
• Being able to learn from others and see how they do things
• Being able to talk to people who have the same challenges that we have and being able to figure out how to do it better

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten.

We have varied use cases and have worked in different business areas. Customer service is one of our biggest business areas, along with investments and finance. We also have some risk compliance, legal, and HR use cases involving about 50 different applications.

Automation Anywhere has freed people's time and effort to do more useful things. Some smaller teams have a lot to work on during the holidays. The solution has improved error reduction and work-life balance. It was all the more useful during COVID-19 when we worked from home for four years. RPA was a godsend. People could do things more easily. We continue to grow our program through this year because of the benefits it provides.

We really like all the features of the solution. The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use. In 2018, we assessed four different products available on the market. We chose Automation Anywhere because it seemed to be the easiest and most intuitive to use for non-technical people. That has always been our model. We are a very citizen developer-focused organization in terms of RPA and intelligent automation.

The integration of Automation Anywhere with our business applications is excellent. We haven't yet encountered an application with which it doesn't integrate. That's the point of Automation Anywhere or RPA. You use the applications as is. It sits as a bridge or a layer on top of your existing application and does a fabulous job.

We have integrated very few use cases into our workflow. We hope to do that a bit more with attended automation and Copilot. We have no complaints so far regarding documents, but we hope to do a little more with that. From what I've heard, you have a lot more API integrations available now than before. We would like to assess them and use them.

Automation Anywhere has definitely improved work-life balance and error reduction. Our audit and compliance team regularly advocates for the RPA team. They reach out to different business areas when they're auditing them. They are absolutely one of our biggest advocates. We have seen an overall improvement in employee morale with the various benefits we have gotten apart from the obvious time-saving.

The biggest metric that we use is annualized automated hours. I think we have saved about 50,000 annualized hours. In addition, we have saved another 50,000 hours for automated monitoring where people aren't needed. It has saved us a lot of time.

Automation Anywhere is excellent at providing automation at scale.

Through my sessions yesterday, I'm absolutely very interested in the benchmarking process that comes as a part of the Pathfinder program. We are also hoping to use Copilot very, very soon.

We haven't used Professional Service Accelerators yet because of how our program is structured. We started five years ago. We do everything in-house, including training and development. Our citizen developer program is quite robust. We have been able to do all our migrations and development ourselves.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event is connecting with many different people. I've been coming to the Imagine event since 2019. Every time I come here, listening to all the keynote speakers on the first day makes me realize that the world is moving at such a fast pace, and we are so behind.

You meet people and realize that these are all possibilities and opportunities for us to be a part of this revolution. It's amazing, and it always feels great to come to the Imagine event.

The most important part of the Imagine event is the people. We have worked with Automation Anywhere all the time. We have worked with excellent people, whether it's the customer success team, the accounts team, or all the leaders at Automation Anywhere. It is wonderful to meet all of these people and hear and see what their vision is and what their thoughts are.

The highlight of every Imagine event is all the products and services that are coming in the near future that we could use or leverage. It's really exciting. It's just me this time, but we usually have more people at Imagine. People are generally very excited to come and be part of it.

With Automation Anywhere or RPA, the way we automate things now is different from traditional automation. The focus of our organization has been to help nontechnical business people automate their own processes. It makes it so much easier for them to learn to automate their own work as opposed to traditional automation, which was mainly done by IT.

It is extremely easy for business users who do not have technical skills to use Automation Anywhere. We use the Automation Anywhere training. We train our own citizen developers within the organization, but the training program is based on what Automation Anywhere provided us at the beginning.

While we have to teach business users how to use basic technical things, we also have to teach technical people how to approach business and business processes. That's a part of our training program. Apart from that, it's very intuitive and straightforward. It's equivalent to a six-month-old who can operate an iPhone.

We take our cues for the solution's learning curve from the Automation Anywhere initial training. We think it takes about six weeks for people to learn to use Automation Anywhere effectively, and we build that into our training program. We cover the basics in week one. We take a use case and work with that in week two. People continue working on their use cases in the third, fourth, and fifth weeks.

In week six, we target to put the use cases into production and cover more advanced topics. We have continued collaboration with our developers to learn new skills. I think six weeks is the amount of time needed for people to be comfortable using the tool on their own for their own use cases.

On our platform, we have about 50 other applications integrated with Automation Anywhere. We have expanded our program from RPA to intelligent automation. Intelligent document processing, Alteryx, Power Automate, and Automation Anywhere actually work hand in hand. While Automation Anywhere is still our main automation orchestration program, we integrate these other automating applications along with it.

I could personally use automated testing, which we currently do not have in Automation Anywhere. When we looked at the document processing IQ Bot, it didn't work for our documents. Since I haven't looked at it recently, I don't know if it needs improvement now. I'm sure the current version is much better.

We started using Automation Anywhere at the end of 2018, so, it's been five years and counting.

We have no complaints about the solution's technical support. I rate the entire customer success team a solid 11 out of 10. That's my comparison scale. Over the last five years, we have had five customer success managers, and all of them have been excellent. They had different personalities and different ways of working, but all of them were excellent. The last four are personal friends now.

Positive

We started seeing a return on investment after the first year and a half of using Automation Anywhere. The growth has been a little bit slow but steady during the time we were all working from home, but I'm hoping for it to grow again over the next 12 months. We'll probably have bigger and better stories to share at the next Imagine event.

I think the solution's pricing is reasonable. Setup cost is what you expect in the industry so far, and the licensing is at par. However, I like the ease of licensing and the flexibility in scaling up or down. We have done that over the last few years. I am looking forward to moving to the cloud between now and the end of August. That will change the licensing model a little bit.

We do not have Dev Stage licenses. From what I understand, it's going to be a pool that we pull out of. It'll be different, but I think it'll give us more flexibility.

We did not use a different RPA solution before using this. We assessed four different products, starting at the end of 2017 through 2018, and realized that Automation Anywhere is the best fit for us. We still think the same because it works great, and we have no reason to complain. We haven't had the need for any other product just yet.

For our current setup, Automation Anywhere is set up on a private cloud on-premises. However, we are working to move to the Automation Anywhere cloud. We are assessing and going through the initial steps. We hope to be on the Automation Anywhere cloud by the end of this year.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We primarily automate tasks in the financial area, including invoice processing. We can automate audits and do onboarding and offboarding as well, among other tasks. 

Automation Anywhere is simplifying processes. It is helping us create better customer experiences. 

The Co-Pilot feature is one of the features we really like. It's helped accelerate automation adoption more broadly across our organization. There are a lot of use cases for it. Co-Pilot has helped us increase productivity. Automation Anywhere in general makes tasks faster. We can do jobs in a couple of minutes versus hours or days.

We can do automation for some complex issues.

Before the processes were automated, there were a lot of gaps and places where human error could occur. Processes that took days and days of time are streamlined and reduced significantly.

Even for users who don't have technical knowledge, there are drag-and-drop features that help them create automation. They don't need to be technical. 

It's helped us free up staff time to work on other tasks. All of the people who were initially part of the job processes can be moved off to other things. The automation handles the tasks. 

We have other tools integrated into Automation Anywhere, including Microsft Programs. 

The integration of automation into workflows and business applications has been good. It's been easy to adopt.

It's positively affected our business. We've been able to apply it to broader jobs and save time. It's enhanced user and customer experiences and ensures we have on-time interactions with customers. 

We've been able to save on time and cost. We've witnessed a lot of savings. We're able to spend a few minutes on tasks instead of hours or days. 

It can provide automation at scale. We've been able to develop programs that engage teams effectively.

We can go online and learn about what we learn about Automation Anywhere. There is AI training on the roadmap, and we're excited to see how much AI will enhance the solution in the future. 

We'd like to see more AI features.

Technical support was okay. They have been able to supply patches to us for issues. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

The setup process was easy. We were able to leverage some time savings during the deployment. We didn't have too much downtime.

We initially began the deployment with a reseller. 

The pricing and licensing are reasonable. We were able to get what we needed. The vendor understand what we wanted and offered certain pricing based on what we wanted. As we scale up, the pricing will change according to how we use it. 

We did evaluate other options and decided not to move forward. 

I'd rate the solution at nine out of ten.

I am the manager of our intelligent automation COE within HR. We operate in a federated model. I lead the HR team, and there are similar teams that exist across the company in five or six other areas.

We have plenty of use cases within HR specifically. We have automation for candidate-facing opportunities before people join the company. We especially have a lot of automation opportunities for our recruiting. The human capital management platform that we use is an SAP product. We use SAP SuccessFactors, so naturally, a lot of our automation opportunities come through that platform. There are a lot of emails and notifications to managers for talent management, talent acquisition, and all the way through to payroll, or anything that falls underneath the HR function. Nothing is off limits, and we have pretty much touched most of the functional areas within the department.

In terms of comparing the processes and tasks automated using Automation Anywhere versus how they were done prior to implementation, a lot of the processes had remained the same, especially in the early years. A lot of people were leveraging RPA platforms to recreate processes the way a human was doing them, so the look and feel were very similar to how a human was doing a process, going across applications over the UI, whereas now, there is a heavy focus on process improvement. A lot of people are leaning into process improvement or re-engineering a process before it is automated and making sure that we are automating the right thing. 

It allows for more reliable dynamic automations if you can leverage something out of the UI. You can leverage a database or an API versus automating something similar to how a human would click through a screen. There is definitely a heavy emphasis on design requirements or completely changing a process from a functional perspective, which takes a lot of work, but your automation is easier to create and maintain in the long run.

Before Automation Anywhere, I have used other RPA platforms. From comparing it to others, it is very intuitive. I do not have a development background, but I lead a team of developers. I am trying to manage and teach them how to use the tool as well. I find that it comes across as very easy to use. I have seen a handful of new developers pick it up within a couple of days. They are able to understand the UI and create their first couple of automations within a few weeks and then they get running with very complex things within the first year. It is very intuitive to use. There are definitely a lot more capabilities coming out, but it is all within the same platform. If you know how to go through the platform, they make it very easy to deploy technical solutions.

Automation Anywhere is one of the easier platforms to learn. There are a lot of online resources, and they also have a community forum. If there is not a video on how to do something explicitly and you have a question, in their developer community, people are quick to respond. You can also simply Google something or look at their website, and you will be able to find an answer for it. Especially after you go through the first couple of days of their university's online training through the community version or get your hands on automation, it clicks pretty quickly. When you see it once and learn everything that is in the platform, everything comes pretty quickly after that, so the learning curve is pretty shallow. 

In terms of the tools that are integrated with Automation Anywhere, we are doing a lot of work within ServiceNow. I just became aware they have a thing called Connector Builder, which basically allows us to build connections right there within Automation Anywhere with ServiceNow. There are other integrations with SAP or Active Directory right there in the developer's toolkit so that they can build automations with it. This makes integrating with your system of records or whatever systems you are automating a lot easier.

We have not done any integrations with document automation. That is a big use case that we are looking at. I know intelligent document processing has come a long way, so I am very interested to see how seamless that integration works out. In terms of being able to integrate and leverage any of our SaaS platforms or on-prem applications that we are automating, we have not seen any limitations to it. We have been able to automate everything. Being able to use API task paths or just expose more endpoints from an API perspective makes the developers' lives a lot easier. It is technically a little bit harder, but if you are able to use APIs, then integrating that way will alleviate future maintenance for automation. It is definitely useful to have that in the platform.

Automation Anywhere has had a big impact on the business. I can speak mostly from an HR perspective. All of our automations that are currently running in production save about 2 million dollars annually, both from a cost savings and cost avoidance perspective. Certain things have a dollar amount. There is a dollar amount associated with a transaction that we can automate, and then we can also inject that time back into our employees' days. Freeing up that capacity allows them to go use their human decision-making skills on more advanced and complex projects and allows automations to do that manual, repetitive, and mundane work. Hours-wise, I do not have a metric, but we are able to save 2 million dollars with our portfolio. We are continuing to add new automations, which makes that number go up and up. 

In terms of time savings, it has been super helpful. We are able to give employees their time back.

We have not had any issues with scalability. Everything from our licensing structure and being able to deploy bots across the enterprise is pretty efficient. Being able to get the most out of our bot runners and start looking at bot performance and utilization across those machines has enabled us to get the most out of it. We are able to deploy everything that at least HR needs right now. I know some of the other companies or departments might need more bot runners to keep up with that scalability. When it comes to end-to-end automation and working across COEs in a federated model, that is a different story. We have not tackled that yet, but in terms of being able to deliver work for HR at our company, Automation Anywhere has been a huge help, and there were no issues in terms of getting the job done.

Automation Anywhere offers a lot of programs to get involved. I recently became involved in their MVP, the Most Valuable Pathfinder program. That is a smaller group in the Pathfinder community that allows us to see early access to what is coming and things that will be showcased at Imagine or the products clubs. We sometimes will be able to get early access to dev environments to go poke around and see what is coming. That helps leadership also see what is coming and be able to make a decision on whether or not to buy new features or capabilities. It gives us a little bit more time to go out to our business stakeholders and the people we are automating processes for and say that there is a use case here. Could we apply some new technologies? 

Four or five years ago, we looked at everything in terms of whether we could automate a functional process, but now, there is a lot more coming with Generative AI and intelligent document processing. There are product clubs and community forums to see how others are leveraging the same tools. It is super helpful to see how other people are applying the same technology. It may spark some interest throughout our company.

The most valuable feature of the platform right now for us is just getting the most out of the tool. When I first joined the company, we were on version 11, which is the on-premise version of Automation Anywhere. Getting over to the new cloud platform A360 has enabled us to get the most out of general RPA or robotic process automation. There are plenty more tools that we are looking at, but just being able to automate functional processes, whether through the UI or APIs, to alleviate that manual work from the department has been really our bread and butter. That is where we see a lot of the value for the company right now.

From a platform perspective, our model has been getting operational data back out to our automation owners. We are a pretty small team. We have about 70 automations in production. Everything that we automate, we naturally own a fraction of that just from a technical perspective. Having a team of developers, you want them focused on building new things. We are at an inflection point where we have automated so much that just keeping the lights on certainly takes 20% to 50% of the time, depending on the time of year. Being able to enable the stakeholders is one of my main focuses. If we are automating their process, I want them to continue owning that as much as possible. We are just expanding on the bot insights. From a security perspective, there have been some challenges for us getting our customers in there from a role-level security perspective and making sure that they have full access to the control room and their automation after it is automated. Being able to manage a digital worker has been a big focus. That is what I am looking to get the most out of the tool right now.

I have been in automation for about seven years now. This is my second or third year with Automation Anywhere, specifically. I just went over my two-year mark. This is the beginning of the third year using the platform.

The stability of Automation Anywhere is fantastic. The platform itself is very reliable. Automation, in general, can be finicky sometimes, and it will break. That is business as usual, but in terms of the platform, reliability, and uptime, it is good. If there are patches, by being on the cloud, we get them faster. Fixes and new features are constantly available to us. We have no complaints there. It has been a great journey.

I have not had any issues being able to deploy solutions for all of HR. The platform has everything to offer that we would need to automate for our company.

Their customer support is very good. There are very few times when we have to go out and open up a ticket, but every time we do, we get very timely support. We seem to be getting connected to the same reps, which is super helpful to build that relationship. If we cannot find a knowledge article or something online, they point us in the right direction or let us know if there is a patch or something else coming that will fix it for us.

I have used a competitor. I worked with UiPath for about four years before Automation Anywhere. There are a lot of similarities in terms of conceptual robotic process automation and similar trends in terms of intelligent document processing, process mining, and task mining. I am sure they all have features around Generative AI.

It was deployed before I joined. In terms of the deployment model, it is probably fully on the cloud, but I am not too sure. When I joined two years ago, we were on version 11 on-prem. One of the biggest things I had to do was migrate us from version 11 to the cloud version.

Even if we do not automate anything and just keep the automations that we have running, that is going to save around 2 million dollars year over year for our HR group. Continuing to expand into new automations will drive higher ROI. So, year over year, even if we do not continue to automate anything, those savings and those hours continually go back into the business.

I do not have any experience with pricing and licensing. We have an admin team and IT team that handles a lot of the infrastructure and technology, so I would not be able to speak too much about that.

Automation Anywhere was evaluated before I joined my current company, so I cannot speak much about that. I know they worked with an implementation partner, and that Automation Anywhere was obviously the chosen one.

We do not use Automation Co-Pilot. It is definitely one of the items or features that I am very interested in. I was excited to get my hands on it during the bot games today at the Imagine event and see how it works. You can give it a string of text, and it will generate code for you right there in the control room. That is super helpful. I am looking to see how my developers react to that as well. I am sure that would save some time from the developer aspect. There is another aspect for business users. I certainly think there are some use cases there that they would be interested in looking at.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event has been connecting with everyone in person. I work remotely, so it is nice to see people in person. We get to sit in a room and do the bot games again. We get to see some cool new features and everything around Generative AI. I do not hear the term RPA so much. The big focus in the world is Generative AI. There are a lot of keynotes, and we are able to see how people are starting to apply it early. There is a lot of excitement. It is an exciting time, and I am very interested to see how we will be able to leverage Automation Anywhere with the new technologies.

The Imagine experience is energetic. The world of Gen AI feels like a bit of a playground. It is generating a lot of buzz all the way up at our executive level, and I am sure it is the same for a lot of people. I see the wheels spinning for everyone. There are ideas, and it is good to see everyone saying to start small. It felt a little bit daunting how we are going to apply this, but it is nice to see everyone reiterating the same thing, "It is coming, and you have to be careful. Start small, and it is a journey." It is nice. It is a good pivot.

If I were to invite people to the Imagine event, I would say that it feels like a tight-knit community. There are probably a couple of thousand people here. Seeing familiar faces and being able to meet everyone and talk about some of the same struggles that we might be seeing is good. We get to know how others are thinking through it. Being able to see the new technologies is awesome. That was one of the main reasons I wanted to come. It forces you to take a look at what is coming next and how others are applying it and start thinking so that you can make a decision on where you can help your customers with it.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a solid eight out of ten. It is not perfect. There are probably a couple of little things, but being with the tool for two years, I have seen so much being changed. It is a playground. There are plenty of features and capabilities. We are just scratching the surface, so I am excited to see what is next. It is very good.