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.

We mostly started using Automation Anywhere for RPA projects. Now, we have a lot of intelligent automation. A few of our cases are using document automation since we have a lot of technical documentation in our engineering enterprise. 

Automation Anywhere brings a lot of value, not only via automation but with citizen developers. People who do not have the ability to create technical solutions are now able to do it. We are doing some things like hackathons with Automation Anywhere. It's another way of adding value to the business.

The document automation is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The new enhanced version is a game changer. We have gained lots of improvements by extracting data, including unstructured data from images to structured data. With the quality and accuracy, we are now able to bring lots of value. We've using generative AI with this data and making the automation more intelligent.

The processes and tasks automated by Automation Anywhere versus how they were done prior to implementation are much more streamlined. We get a lot of efficiency. We get precision. We're able to free up labor tasks and gain efficiency and productivity. There are some processes that need special attention or there are concerns about governance. In finance, an error can be an obstacle. It can be a pitfall also. Confidence is always a thing we are looking for. We must be confident there are no errors. With Automation Anywhere, we can remove mistakes.

It is easy for business users who don't have technical skills. When we communicate properly the opportunity or challenge to people, and when we can show the value of automation, they embrace it. It brings those even without technical skills a lot of opportunities. Even we are surprised with what people can do. People know best what they need to do with their tasks. If they can automate a solution by themselves, it brings a lot of value. 

The learning curve is very short. We have started a few hackathons. We've noticed, in one week, that we were able to do 40 cases. We did it twice. So in two weeks, we have almost 80 cases from idea to construction. We did it in two different cities in Brazil, and it was an amazing opportunity to bring value to people who did not have technical skills in such a short time frame.

We are starting to use Automation Co-Pilot, and we are very enthusiastic. We are very happy with this new tool and expect many more use cases from it in the future.

Co-Pilot helped accelerate automation adoption. It's an easy way to do more with the automation. People feel free to focus on the problem and not on the technical skills. This is a big game changer when there's a person without technical skills. 

Co-Pilot has also helped increase productivity. Even those without technical skills can automate tasks and develop things very quickly. They can have an idea and come up with a solution in a very short timeframe. It can free up staff time. They can automate tasks to free up time to work on other things. It helps speed up work significantly.

There are applications we can embed Automation Co-Pilot into a few websites. We have a lot in the enterprise. Things like Salesforce and Teams can be integrated. We can do a lot by activating Co-Pilot from Teams. We can use it as an assistant in Teams for our team. We've also integrated Google Cloud and AI to add in more AI solutions. 

The integration is helpful. We have quite a few use cases where we've integrated with Microsoft tools and local record systems, such as SAP and Vertex AI. 

The labor costs have been lowered. It's always a concern and the proper use of our staff, and their capacity and competency, is important. With automation, we can help them focus on more high-value tasks. Automation gives them the ability to move away from repetitive and boring tasks and move them to more important areas.

We've been able to save a lot of time and costs by replacing repetitive and boring labor tasks with more important ones. 

We're leveraging other Automation Anywhere programs. There's a lot of value when using professional services. We can look at similar use cases and learn from those. 

Automation Anywhere can be improved by offering more integration with many more applications. While it is very integrated nowadays, the complexity is a key issue. Common users must have the opportunity to integrate it with many more environments. 

We've been using the solution for four years.

The stability is very good. It is a robust solution. We haven't faced any issues within the four years or use. Stability, combined with innovation, has been invaluable. The product is never static. We always have access to more enhancements and products with updates within a very short timeframe.

Automation Anywhere provides automation at scale. It's realized mostly when we combine many technologies and use them in the same process. When we use it in conjunction with other things, we can gain the most value out of each technology. The limits nowadays are almost zero as there is so much integration possible. 

We have Gold Service with Automation Anywhere. Support has been a big advantage for us. We have many assets and 8,000 employees. It's a big operation. That's why we need proper support that can help us with multiple automation. Any change or mistake can be rapidly managed with the level of support we are provided. 

We did not previously use a different automation solution. We started from scratch with Automation Anywhere.

We've been able to deploy the solution easily. We've been able to integrate it with our systems of record and other tools. 

The experience has been good. It's important to do it with the proper partner and proper team. When we merge product and project teams, it helps make the deployment process seamless.

We do have some partners that help us with the deployment. 

We've witnessed an ROI not only on the automation but in the integration with Google, Microsoft, and other platforms. The net value we receive is across many aspects. Now, we have an average of more than 30,000 hours saved per year on labor costs. We've also seen more cost reductions related to automation. 

The pricing of the solution is okay. We've bought licensing via a big bid. It was hard to define as it was the first time we were using the solution. Of the second round, we were very focused on what we needed. We understood the process better. It's provided a lot of value these days. 

We did evaluate other options, including solutions from Microsft and SAP. The difference is that Automation Anywhere can integrate different platforms. That way, we are not limited to just one platform. We can combine many different technologies while having the liberty to scale across many different processes. 

The Imagine Conference by Automation Anywhere has been helpful. It's a good event for everyone - for both technical and business people, as well as students. It helps everyone realize the opportunities of automation and unlock value in the face of challenges. We're seeing automation become simpler and user-friendly, which is allowing us to be more productive. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. It brings a lot of innovation to our company. It's great for technical and non-technical people. 

As a financial services company, we have a variety of use cases for different areas of our business, as well as some of our IT partners. We have automations that help perform payment extensions on customer accounts. We have automations that track email communications on accounts that are in collections. For our IT partners, we have bots that perform password resets for applications that our IT team supports, as well as the provisioning automations that we use to grant access or change access for team members at our company.

They have been informative in terms of new features, components, and capabilities that are available to us as their customer. We have a regular cadence set up with our account manager and our support manager to ensure that we are able to leverage some of those new components. We have had the opportunity to test or play around with some of the new features being rolled out to see if it is something that we would be able to introduce into any of our use cases at GM Financial.

During the development and the discovery phase for the use cases, while walking through a use case with the process owner, we were able to identify some opportunities that could have helped them before the process was automated. By seeing where they were struggling with manually performing the process and automating the process, we have been able to give them a lot of time back with the use of some of the features.

It is fairly easy to understand. The courses that Automation Anywhere University offers, especially for citizen development, and even for those who are getting into development, have pretty simple course content. It is not overly complex or too technical where somebody could get lost in the instruction. It is fairly easy for anybody who does not have that technical background to pick up and use. If anything, it would probably give them an opportunity in terms of what background they want to understand more to supplement or complement what they learn from Automation Anywhere University.

For a first-time user of Automation Anywhere, there is not a huge learning curve. The content and the instructions through Automation Anywhere University are comprehensible. It is easy for somebody to practice, learn, and build on top of what they have learned. As different use cases come around, there are different opportunities to use some of the different features or variables in development. It will help strengthen how they learn or map out how to use the tool.

We have dependent environments that our automation will log into or interact with. There are applications that our automations interact with or are integrated with. We have automations that are using Salesforce and SharePoint. We have an FIS platform for automations servicing customer accounts. We have various applications and third-party websites that our automations interact with daily.

We have automated processes that were heavy with human interaction. Through automation, we have been able to allow those human resources to be reallocated to other areas of the company, doing different processes manually. These automations are working daily beyond normal business hours, on weekends and holidays. Business partners that are benefiting from the automations have been able to distribute those resources to other areas.

Automation Anywhere has most definitely saved us time and costs through automation. Our business partners are able to receive the benefits of automation and distribute those human resources to other areas of their business. By saving time and costs associated with those human resources, less overtime is being paid. Especially for processes that are dependent and have time-sensitive SLAs, we are not accruing any penalties or anything like that. We are able to leverage automation to avoid those costs. It is not only from a time and cost perspective but also risk avoidance. Risk avoidance is something that is not necessarily highlighted when it comes to automation, but I feel that we have also been able to avoid risk.

We are looking at the different programs that Automation Anywhere offers. We are engaged with our account manager on Pathfinder, and we are able to leverage the ability to map where our program currently is and where we want it to go. We are putting some key ideas, thoughts, and time frames around where we want to be when it comes to building our automation program at GM Financial.

Right now, when I look at the platform for Automation Anywhere, the ease of use for the control room from a production support standpoint for our L1 and L2 team members has been amazing. With our conversion from v11 to A360, there has been better ease of development of components within the control room for our development teams. Obviously, it is apples to oranges, but the experience since going to A360 has been amazing. We have been able to establish some reasonable components, which has made our delivery efforts a lot easier since we have been in A360. From a support perspective, the ease of use with the control room and being able to manage those devices in the control room has been easy for us as well. 

If I look across the use cases that we have, there is more opportunity for us to collaborate with Automation Anywhere to see or maybe explore some potential opportunities for new capabilities within the platform. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of anything that they would need to improve on, but there are probably opportunities to explore some potential use cases where maybe there is a feature that is not yet available. We can discover and pioneer something together.

At GM Financial, our journey began in January of 2020. I have been supporting the development team that has been building bots in Automation Anywhere since 2020.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate my experience with the support of Automation Anywhere a ten.

They are very responsive when our platform admins or our developers need to open up any cases. We have a weekly support cadence with them as well as an account cadence with them. In the different areas that we receive support from Automation Anywhere, they are very responsive and very attentive to our needs.

Positive

When we started our RPA journey in 2018, we had a third party. It was outsourced to a third party that had a proprietary tool. We managed to do that for a few years, but being able to host, support, and build internally was a key factor for us. When the company decided to look at possible solutions to deliver these services, Automation Anywhere was what they selected. When we moved to A360, we took those automations that were hosted externally and brought them into our portfolio as well.

Deploying Automation Anywhere was definitely a learning experience for us, especially when we stood up the platform and tried to understand the deployment flow internally for the team. Our platform admins who do the actual deployment got their system before the support team that helps with the checklist of activities before the deployment takes place. That is where we had to learn and set up our framework to get it deployed.

Prior to actual automation deployments and getting the environment set up, we had to work with our infrastructure team. We had to make sure that we had the right resources in place and that those resources were working adequately before we launched our first automation onto the platform. Internally, we learned some lessons along the way. That is a part of the course for anybody who is deploying a new solution in their infrastructure. Overall, it did help us learn the importance of having a good framework in place so that if we need to build, expand, or change anything, we would be able to accommodate that appropriately.

We have most definitely seen an ROI internally with our development and production support teams. Even our business partners are receiving that return on investment because we have been able to help them realize the benefits that they are getting by automating their business processes. That return is not only to the IT team; that return is tenfold to the business.

I am not engaged in that portion of it; my leader is, which is good because then I do not have to have many discussions.

During the exploration phase for finding the tool for GM Financial, we looked at other tools like UiPath. I believe Blue Prism was another one that was being evaluated. Automation Anywhere was also in the mix. They were also trying to determine if they wanted to continue to host externally, but all in all, Automation Anywhere was where they went.

We are starting to get into an Automation Co-Pilot use case where we can showcase or pilot that with the business. One of the things with technology is that it is a journey, especially for an older financial services company like GM Financial. It involves adapting, understanding, and educating on new technologies and features. Before we can deploy things, we have to prove them. We have to show them. We have to help them understand what the benefit of using it is going to be. We are getting ready to pilot our first co-pilot using Automation Anywhere, and that is for our customer service or customer experience department.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event is the opportunity to network and also to see Automation Anywhere showcase any new capabilities and enablements that are available to Automation Anywhere customers. At the keynote session yesterday, it was really nice to see how somebody is recognizing that a lot of times, departments within IT are siloed. They are working through challenges to be more collaborative and engaging to improve the services that we deliver when it comes to automation. Learning and hearing those things and listening to different breakout sessions confirms that we are not alone on our journey when it comes to our RPA program and other things because Automation Anywhere is not just RPA. It is good to know that we are not alone, and it is good to network with people who are experiencing the same challenges or opportunities that we have. All the information and the networking are my favorite things of all the Imagine conferences.

The Imagine experience is fun. It is exciting just because of the fact that we all have these opportunities within our grasp. It is just how we choose to go after it or how we choose to engage. There is the excitement of brainstorming or sharing ideas with people across different companies or services. You feed on that energy, take it back home, and work with your teams to continue to deliver and support.

Three reasons that I would highlight for colleagues and fellow team members to come to an Imagine event are:

• The content that Automation Anywhere shares about upcoming enablement and capabilities that are going to be made available to them.
• The information shared and networking is done with people from other companies across the globe.
• The events in breakout sessions are hosted at different times during the day.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten. I have not had any negative experiences with Automation Anywhere.

We use Automation Anywhere to process our collections. 

We couldn't hire more people, but we had some information stored in Excel that we needed to distribute. The sales information was centralized in one area, so we automated the process of putting the information into Excel so everyone could help themselves. The benefit we get from this is increased efficiency. The bot performs the tasks four times faster than a human. Our goal is efficiency, not replacing bots humans with bots. We wanted to do more with the eight people we had and allow people to focus on what was important.

We got what we wanted, but the implementation took slightly longer than expected because we changed our methods and partners. We had some issues with our partner at the beginning, but we implemented the software in one or two months. It was fast.

I think the person in charge over there has the same mentality now, but we wanted to automate everything that is transactional or everything that impacts the client at the end of the day. We were looking to use AI to make development or programming more efficient, like finding some codes. I know Automation Anywhere has some kind of AI incorporated in it that can read PDFs and stuff. That would be nice to use, but I haven't had a chance to implement it.

We were working on a system called AS 400. Automation Anywhere performed well on that old system. It handled complicated processes. I had to review different menus and screens and give resources, storage, and databases. That's complicated.

We found a local Automation Anywhere expert and then trained someone inside the company to be a developer. This person had technical skills, so it was easy for him to understand the things in Automation Anywhere. The learning part was kind of quick, but I don't think that would be easy for a normal business user. I think it would be more complicated for a normal business user. I won't say that I learned all about Automation Anywhere, but I know how to automate simple tasks I learned by watching some videos and checking the community forums.

The Insight feature could be improved. I don't think there's a lot of information about how to use Insight, so you have to try different scenarios to understand that feature better.  

If I compare Automation Anywhere with UiPath, which has something cool that lets you automate a workflow. We have no positive response when we try to use it with Automation Anywhere. We are doing everything by code and the drag-and-drop component.

I don't think it's easy because Automation Anywhere is marketed as a low-code solution, but it isn't low-code at all. It requires some programming skills, and I don't think it would be easy for a non-technical user to program something on Automation Anywhere. 

One challenge the company faced while integrating Automation Anywhere was people. The IT department is big and has been divided into different areas, including databases, infrastructure, and support. To adopt automation anywhere, you have to put everything on the table and see what you want to do.  I also require resources with the capabilities and technical skills to program in Automation Anywhere.

We have used Automation Anywhere for four years.

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of 10. The support is good. The team from Colombia responsible for selling in Latin America can provide whatever you need. I don't have any complaints about that. They are always willing to offer you proof of concept in case you have to use it. I talked to somebody in Colombia because we wanted to do something in terms of proof of concept about document automation because we had so many processes that included PDFs. 

Positive

Automation Anywhere is deployed on the cloud, so I think it was very straightforward and fast. It took around one to two weeks.

Automation Anywhere is somewhat expensive. The prices are slightly higher, but if you need something, you must pay for it.

We also evaluated Blue Prism.

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10. I would recommend It for a medium-sized or enterprise business. Because of the cost, it isn't appropriate for a small business. The solution itself is good, but it isn't a low-code product.

In the financial industry, Automation Anywhere helps us streamline tasks by automating processes like invoice entry and employee onboarding, along with many other functions.

Businesses leverage Automation Anywhere to streamline their workflows and minimize operational problems.

Automation Anywhere has empowered our clients to achieve greater accuracy, enhanced control over their processes, and liberated employee time for more strategic endeavors.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use even for non-technical people once they receive the training.

Automation Anywhere is considered user-friendly, with the learning curve manageable for beginners. The available resources provide a solid foundation for new users to get started.

It seamlessly integrates with our daily applications, providing a valuable human-like interaction that enhances the automation process.

Co-Pilot improves productivity by automating tasks like reviewing purchase requisitions, which previously required multiple people. It also allows individuals to manage workloads that once demanded multiple people, allowing them to focus on more valuable tasks.

Generative AI stands out in automation, especially for crucial tasks like invoice processing, where it can extract information, or for tasks requiring web research, going beyond simple rule-based automation.

Automation Anywhere offers integration with various Large Language Model applications, and for connecting these external systems, utilizing their API is the best approach.

Automation Anywhere's document automation, powered by IQ Bots and now enhanced with AI, stands out as a particularly valuable feature. This combination allows for seamless integration of a wider range of document types, streamlining our workflows.

Automation Anywhere's current requirement for upfront annual payments limits flexibility for customers. Offering a wider range of payment options, such as monthly installments, would be a welcome improvement.

While Automation Anywhere's current learning materials cater to junior and new users, senior developers require more in-depth content to effectively utilize the platform's full potential.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for six years.

Automation Anywhere's technical support has a prompt response time, with Portuguese-speaking representatives in Brazil. For complex issues, they efficiently escalate tickets to a global team of engineers for further assistance.

Positive

I would rate Automation Anywhere ten out of ten.