Global operations executives’ in-trays are stacked to the ceiling. They must find answers to the digital dichotomy as enterprises balance the macroeconomic slowdown with the big hurry to innovate. IT and operational budgets are tightening, and innovation to react to macro headwinds increasingly must be funded by operational savings. Despite the noise around GenAI, intelligent automation remains a key strategic lever for achieving those savings.
However, the automation discussions are changing markedly and are no longer big headlines. As the hype around GenAI has taken center stage, the emphasis is moving away from RPA as the reference technology. HFS has repeatedly declared RPA dead. Suffice it to say this is not meant to be taken literally but that RPA would eventually become obsolete and replaced by more comprehensive automation platforms, orchestration, and broader professional services. Having RPA bellwether UiPath abandon its “robot for every employee” vision statement and replace it with the more comprehensive “to enable automation across all knowledge work to accelerate human achievement” speaks much of the story.
Let’s rewind and take stock of where the automation discussions stand. HFS discussed these issues with executives at C TWO, an orchestration and management platform provider, and its client BNP Paribas.
The fundamental value lever in the technology arbitration era is all about architecting and orchestrating the rapidly changing technology ecosystem in line with the client’s business model. Enterprises are running out of ‘obvious’ places where onshore people can be replaced with offshore people, and they have no choice but to investigate new avenues of value that are ‘less’ obvious. Those avenues can only be found by exploiting technologies that can scale operations, provide rapid access to data that gives you a competitive edge, and grant you access to ecosystems to expand business opportunities—new technologies that enable you to run things faster, better, slicker, smarter, and cheaper.
There are two at face-value diverging trends in intelligent automation. On the supply side, the discussions are maturing, and we are moving back to discussing end-to-end processes rather than individual technologies and task automation. Yet, on the buy side, the maturity is still comparatively low as most automation leaders are merely starting their journey. A major HFS study found that 70% of respondents self-rated themselves as automation beginners. One reason for these diverging trends is that the software makers fail to deliver customer success. 87% of respondents say that more value is needed from current investments. Only 6 in 10 initiatives are meeting expectations. As many as 60% of purchased licenses are sitting as shelfware.
Enterprise leaders want digital modernization, but automation is too focused on cost and efficiency rather than supporting the transformational journey. As Exhibit 1 shows, the measures for successful automation are not fully aligned with that aspiration. While focused on business outcomes, most measures are cost-related. Yet, on a more positive note, the market has moved on from the early misguided focus on headcount reduction and views the number of bots deployed as a proxy for automation maturity.
Source: HFS Research Automation Study, 2022
With the ascent of GenAI, the automation discussions are becoming part of a much more fundamental conversation: decoupling routine service delivery from labor arbitrage. The paradigm of people-driven labor arbitrage is running out of steam, and we are seeing the onset of a new S-curve of value creation that HFS calls technology arbitrage. The fundamental value creation lever in the legacy labor arbitrage era has been the centralization of people in a global delivery model. The fundamental value lever in the technology arbitrage era is all about architecting and orchestrating the rapidly changing technology ecosystem in line with the client’s business model. Against this background, how can intelligent automation align with shifting client demands?
HFS discussed these trends with executives at C TWO. Back in 2022, HFS awarded the company (known then as RPA Supervisor) the Hot Vendor status because of its commitment to helping enterprises scale automation through a “single pane of glass” tooling that enables analytics, orchestration, and—most importantly—24×7 management of RPA portfolios. The motivation for the rebranding was to align itself with the changing market conditions and, consequently, customer requirements. As a technology-agnostic automation management platform that orchestrates and manages automated work, the company’s approach is intrinsically aligned with the challenge of the digital dichotomy and, ultimately, the secular shift toward technology arbitrage.
C TWO stands for command and control of automation operations. The company asserts you cannot have efficient and robust operations without a centralized control system—the cornerstone for an enterprise-wide digital modernization strategy. C TWO’s event-driven orchestration platform prioritizes work in real time, automates support, and doubles bot capacity. Centralized control ensures all automation works together end-to-end for stronger outcomes and better ROI. With that, organizations get workflow service-level agreements (SLAs) and not just task-centric SLAs, resulting in dynamic automation scaling. Its executives translated their approach to simply, “Our goal is to assure it just works—so automation delivers on time, every time.” The key components of C TWO’s platform include:
We interviewed one of C TWO’s oldest customers to get a sense of the effectiveness of its approach.
Discussing these trends with Carlo Guzzone, head of RPA CoE at Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), part of BNP Paribas Group, provided color for how enterprises progress their automation journey. Through the collaboration with C TWO, BNL achieved 97% utilization of its RPA licenses, then gradually shifted to outcomes and speed of business value realization. To put this into context, HFS research has shown that utilization of RPA licenses tends to be below 50%.
BNL is a compelling example of achieving automation maturity—the foundation for dealing with the digital dichotomy. BNL started its RPA journey in 2017 with a leading systems integrator and Blue Prism as a technology provider with the strategic goal of FTE reduction. However, when the demand for RPA bots strongly accelerated, the limitations of this contract’s technical feasibility and the singular focus on FTE savings quickly became apparent. As BNL started to scale and industrialize the deployments, the quality of the bots began to suffer. Thus, when the contract approached the renewal phase, BNL decided to overhaul its strategy and completely change its service provider.
The revised strategy was based on three key elements. First, RPA deployments needed to be industrialized and managed at scale to support the business transformation. Second, the primary focus shifted from cost reduction to aligning business outcomes with business SLA, replacing the goal of FTE reduction. Third, there was a fundamental change in the operating model as the RPA team was split into a run team and a design team.
At the heart of BNL’s team-splitting approach was having one take care of the run business and the other focus on development. The run team leverages C TWO’s ability to intelligently orchestrate tasks and resources, ensuring optimal operations around the clock. By employing APIs for scheduling, BNL is leveraging the dynamic orchestration functionality, which utilizes AI-driven process planning and SLA-based prioritization to move beyond static scheduling methods. C TWO’s dynamic scheduling system prioritizes tasks based on their SLA requirements, ensuring that high-priority and time-sensitive tasks are completed within their specified deadlines, improving compliance and customer satisfaction. One of the differentiating features is real-time adjustments to the schedule based on current conditions and unforeseen changes. C TWO continuously monitors the RPA environment, adjusting task allocations and schedules to deal with exceptions, system load variations, and failures, ensuring the overall system remains robust.
Carlo acknowledged that calculating the business case is complex. While the initial focus was on license and maintenance cost savings, evaluating other benefits, such as quality and development model changes, is more difficult. Nevertheless, the main outcome was a reduced ticket management workload, requiring fewer people. As such, the emphasis is on cost avoidance rather than just cost saving. It’s the difference between what enterprises spend and what they would have had they maintained their old ways and methods of running RPA. For Carlo, C TWO was a critical catalyst of cost avoidance. For him, the primary objective is not about reducing costs but controlling costs and improving efficiency while scaling automation initiatives. Only through industrialized automation can organizations deliver on broader transformation goals. He estimated that C TWO has been instrumental in providing €2.2M in annual value, with €0.87M directly attributed to its impact.
The increasing complexity of operations mandates a broad orchestration of automation approaches managed increasingly by technology rather than labor arbitrage. Only through an industrial operational backbone can organizations progress to tackling the digital dichotomy by creating the savings to push the innovation to react to an ever-changing environment. While RPA is dead, the need for broad, innovative automation orchestration is greater than ever.
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