Blue Prism survey revealed that companies seek for Enterprise Automation Platform to Enable Self-Service Business Users to Achieve Immediate Benefits

Moscow — July 6, 2020 – Delivering new insights into the future of work, today Blue Prism, (AIM: PRSM) announced the findings of its annual global survey in a report titled, “The Impact of a Digital Workforce on Business Agility & Survival”. According to the report, 62% of Russian respondents see robotic process automation (RPA) as solving the global productivity problem, 94% for driving digital transformation, and 68% as essential for business to remain competitive. The survey was conducted on among 100 key decision-makers in companies and 507 knowledge workers in Russia.

Survey results reveal C-suite executives in Russia are embracing automation with 92% looking to deploy and extend these capabilities throughout their organizations, while 81% indicated RPA and/or automation is critical in scaling technologies such as AI across their business. From creating and enhancing jobs, saving time and costs, accelerating and improving work quality, and making organizations more innovative, those surveyed universally agree that RPA is providing a hugely positive impact on work, business agility, and resilience.

Future-Proofing Businesses

In Russia, 68% of business decision-makers believe that RPA and/or Automation is essential for their businesses to remain competitive. These positive sentiments are a reflection of the major time savings, improved accuracy, and cost savings reported by Russian business leaders, 95% of which already have plans in place to extend the use of RPA across their businesses.

In today’s competitive economic environment, Russian decision-makers also recognize that strategic technology investments like RPA can keep their digital transformation efforts on track. In fact, 94% of Russians surveyed identified RPA as an important factor in driving digital transformation - with half (52%) indicating that RPA allows them to scale the deployment of other emerging technologies too. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, 37% of Russian decision-makers reported a struggle to meet customer demand, and 86% felt that automation would help address this challenge.

The New Normal — Post COVID-19

As a part of the study Blue Prism gauging the impact COVID-19 is having on businesses. Thus, 94% of Russian respondents see a renewed urgency to use RPA as a lifeline for maintaining business continuity and ensuring a higher level of overall responsiveness. As well as these respondents also see Digital Workforce as enabling greater competitiveness while supporting remote collaboration in this “new normal”. 100% of respondents are now looking to expand or extend RPA use within their organization.

Tackling Global Productivity

Across every industry, most knowledge-based work isn’t delivering anywhere near its potential, evidenced by diminishing global productivity that’s stagnated at one-tenth of what it was 40 years ago for some economies. With the pandemic, organizations face additional challenges from reduced workforces, customer demands, and macroeconomic pressures. The survey results reveal a positive link between automation, global productivity, business agility, and resilience. Thus, according to a survey 59% of Russian respondents believe too much time is wasted on administration tasks, while it is telling that 66% of those decision-makers see Automation as a solution to the global productivity problem, and 86% feel it can help them meet customer demands too.

A Skills Shift Coming

The global survey reveals there’s a need for re-skilling and training, with over three quarters surveyed indicating that there are skills that they are constantly sourcing for, such as data analysis and data science. To address this, 75% of Russian knowledge workers surveyed indicated their organizations are providing learning opportunities for new skills/qualifications when they introduce technologies that will transform their job.

Automation Anxiety

Fear of automation is diminishing as there’s a growing level of trust with more organizations adopting digital colleagues. Russian knowledge workers are becoming increasingly comfortable with RPA, just 27% worry about related job losses in the next three years. More than half of knowledge workers are excited at the opportunities that RPA will create, while decision-makers feel that adopting new tech will attract talent. Encouragingly, 84% of Russian business decision-makers believe that their employees would trust working alongside a Digital Workforce and 72% would even trust them to manage employees.

"These survey results help validate the sea change we see happening from automation,” says Jason Kingdon, Executive Chairman and CEO of Blue Prism. “COVID-19 has put a spotlight on just what a Digital Workforce can do for business continuity, but it is just the beginning. This is about using intelligent automation to empower the non-technical knowledge worker to do more, faster, and more efficiently, without having to rely on IT. This goes beyond using desktop macros or screen scrapping productivity tools for a quick ROI, intelligent automation is at the center of enabling digital transformations for large-scale enterprises.”

Read the full results of the survey here.