Our journey started with the migration initiative. We had to migrate some processes from our legacy RPA solutions. Next, we started expanding to finance and HR, including integration with other platforms like ServiceNow and Salesforce. There are multiple teams within Paramount, like CBS News, CBS Studios, and Paramount Plus, so we've worked with them to find opportunities to build automation. We've explored multiple use cases that deliver a solid ROI, with a focus on low-code and now-code solutions. 

We have hundreds of application systems at Paramount, including legacy platforms. The merger required us to consolidate many of these systems, so there were many opportunities to use automation. One challenge we faced was that this process required someone to integrate the systems manually. It involved a lot of repetitive, mundane tasks to bridge those gaps. Automation Anywhere helped us accomplish those tasks. 

The framework that previously existed was an on-prem solution. The transition to the cloud was a huge change. The second change was redesigning and refining existing processes. While we were undergoing migration, we talked to various customer groups and decided to revisit the processes and maybe remove some things that were unnecessary. We optimized processes and took the opportunity to revise what was on the existing legacy platforms.

There's a lot of buzz around generative AI, so we are considering that on an organizational level. At the same time, we are focusing on orchestrating end-to-end processes, not just the AI. We are having conversations with tech and business groups about solving enterprise-wide problems, and we can add AI into the mix when necessary. 

I think there are many opportunities to add AI to existing use cases like legal, corporate, finance, and AI. Hopefully, we will start bringing more AI use cases to production, but we are still in the review and proof of concept stage. Still, the leadership is interested, and they've done a lot of research on AI, and we have a separate InfoSec team that must review everything. The VMware team also must review the technology. All of these AI technologies must undergo a stringent vetting process. I'm not part of that, but we share ideas and try to understand what's happening. Data analysis is a critical part. We must ensure that our data doesn't go outside the model, but we're open to any opportunity to improve our solutions and test out what makes sense. We'll try that and see how the end users respond.

Before switching to the cloud version of Automation Anywhere, I worked with v10 and v10, so I appreciate the core functionality and the fact that it's a low-code solution. That is one of the key elements that differentiates Automation Anywhere from other platforms and one of the reasons we have been able to achieve success. 

It's accessible to business users with few technical skills. We've been able to add on to our current framework and build on our existing library of reusable components, allowing developers to build their automations quicker.

The time needed to learn Automation Anywhere has varied, depending on the user. We've taken on a large number of Cylance and Cisco developers. Some can pick it up quicker, but others take a little longer because of their prior project commitments. It's all over the place. It depends on how much time they can devote to learning the solution.

Many requested improvements are already on Automation Anywhere's roadmap, like a better governance model for AI systems. We also want to see more releases for autopilot/co-pilot from a generative AI perspective. We're expecting Automation Anywhere to release those in future updates, and as long as they maintain consistent improvement in their core functionality, I believe that will lead to success.

We have established connectivity with so many applications, so we build reusable components. We identify an application that business users might want to build, so we have a framework ready by the time they're ready to get onboarded and start developing. Automation Anywhere provides a seamless experience for utilizing those packages. They need to keep adding features so the solution doesn't stagnate. One example is email automation. There need to be multiple options for authentication available. 

Automation Anywhere could add more tools to track the processes and ROI, so we can get a better understanding of the cost savings and compliance. We heavily track those metrics and make them available to the leadership for review. 

I have used the cloud version of Automation Anywhere since 2021, but I worked on the previous versions before that in past roles as a consultant. 

Automation Anywhere is highly scalable. That's one of the most significant advantages. We usually build a process on a smaller scale and then extend the capabilities. The scaling is relatively seamless.

I rate Automation Anywhere support eight out of 10. We've had a great experience with tech support. They've helped us with significant challenges we've faced and worked with us on feature requests and bugs. We've had lots of collaborative discussions.

Positive

Automation Anywhere is easy to deploy. Some processes can be deployed in a week, while the more complex processes may take four to six weeks. We have release controls in place, so everything is streamlined. All the deployment testing is handled before the automations go live. 

Upgrading is simple because we're on the cloud platform. We don't need to upgrade anything. Maintenance takes place on the partner's side because the bot engine is installed and maintained there. We only need to install the latest packages to test the new features when they are released. That takes a little time. 

I rate Automation Anywhere eight out of 10. They have a lot of expertise with ERP solutions, and the core features are keeping pace with the market. Automation Anywhere is incorporating new components like generative AI and planning to release a new governance model, so there is constant innovation and the company is working to make things better for business users and developers. It's a competitive product that's easy to deploy and maintain. 

Automation Anywhere is used to elevate the customer experience for our financial advisors. We aim to improve our interactions with them in terms of their requests for updates to their banking instructions or anything else related to their accounts. 

Automation Anywhere has helped us improve our service. Our financial service professionals gave us some feedback that they are spending a lot of time calling our home office to check on the status of requests and doing other things that I would describe as administrative activities. That takes some time that would be better spent building their businesses and growing their relationships with their clients. It allows us to automate and streamline those administrative tasks for our financial professionals and employees.

We did everything manually before we implemented Automation Anywhere. When a financial advisor initiated a request, someone had to input that information into the appropriate record system and communicate with the advisor to update them on the status. Someone needed to follow up on the request and ensure it was completed. 

Automation Anywhere has challenged us to rethink the art of the possible. We're still considering how to leverage AI. Our attitude toward AI is evolving, but we know that it's something we must address. We believe that a delay in adopting could have an exponential effect on our ability to compete and remain among the industry leaders. We are evaluating a few use cases. In particular, we see content and knowledge management as a huge opportunity. We're exploring ways to leverage documentation and natural language processing to quickly process the information and take the appropriate action. 

We have the unattended bots running in our environment and recently launched our first document automation use case. We are also excited about the automation copilot. These use cases are crucial in the wealth management industry, which is paper-intensive, so it's essential to leverage automation for document-focused tasks. Co-pilot allows us to streamline that process while improving the accuracy of the information entering the system record and ensuring efficiency. 

The unattended bots are working behind the scenes so that employees don't need to do work that they had done previously. Our tests of the document automation and copilot features have received a positive initial response.  Employees like the UI and how it brings out the information for them to validate.

We've integrated Automation Anywhere with our internal homegrown systems and a couple of third-party applications through APIs and UI interactions. The integration has been smooth, especially from an API perspective. We can quickly pull together API endpoints for our development and leverage APIs from third parties. It's been pretty easy to bring it all together using some basic Python coding. We spend more time ensuring we have the correct information from the API owner, so we get the right connections. 

From the product side, I like the minimum viable product approach, where the first generation of a new product is released and tested in the market, but it would be great if some of those pieces were a little bit more thought out from a user experience perspective. They could take a little more time to get some insights from their customers like in a beta test or something like that. 

We have used Automation Anywhere for the last 15 months. 

Automation Anywhere's ability to automate at scale is very impressive based on what I've seen internally and heard from subject matter experts. We're starting to see what we can do with it. When we developed a rudimentary proof of concept with co-pilot coupled with document automation, it was eye-opening for our leaders and stakeholders to see how versatile and accurate it was. 

I rate Automation Anywhere support seven out of 10. I would also like to see better communication with their customer success teams. It often takes longer than expected when we submit requests for help or come across a problem we want to resolve. While I can appreciate that it sometimes takes a while to get the appropriate answer, it would be nice to be in constant communication about where they are in the process.

Neutral

Deploying Automation Anywhere was relatively easy. We implemented our first bot last year as a proof of concept. We tried various things to give us a bit of a different flavor. Whether we're using an API, UI, or doing a physical task within a third-party application. Our first bot took 10 weeks to deploy, and the rest took between eight to 10 weeks. The development time is about half of that. Most of our use cases were simple, but it took time to coordinate with various teams, like infrastructure, security team, risk management, and other IT departments. 

My role is in the center of excellence. We're on the business side, not the IT side. The company is a little different in how it sets up its CoE programs. We focus on business processes and engineering. I rely on our technology and security partners for those other pieces. There's a little bit of trial and error. We have to think of security first and foremost. We're protecting our data and our client's data.  

We needed to figure out how it fits into our ecosystem because we had never done it before. We needed to set up virtual desktops, servers, and those sorts of things. We needed to create an Active Directory account for our robots to interact, receive email, use Excel, etc. Early on, we had to learn the nuances because we would need to replicate the processes going forward. We created some reusable runbooks and IDs to set access to the system with different privileges for employees and contractors.

There is some maintenance for bots that utilize UIs, but not those that use APIs. We face more challenges when working with third-party applications because they have scheduled updates. If the bot is scheduled to run on Thursday at 2 pm, but suddenly, a pop-up window appears to run the update. We've mitigated a lot of that. If we don't have APIs, those use cases require a little bit more handholding. 

We leveraged a consulting firm to partner with us on that proof of concept. They brought expertise and ensured we were set up for success. They helped us configure our control room and enabled us to perfect the concepts, so we could see the results and realize how successful we could be with Automation Anywhere's product. 

We looked at some other solutions initially, but one of our sister firms was already an Automation Anywhere customer, and they gave the solution glowing reviews. We saw how successful they had been in leveraging Automation Anywhere's platform, so it made the decision easy for us. 

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10. They're passionate about the product and want to see us succeed as customers. They will go to bat and contact the engineers to help us achieve what we want. We have on-site visits with them and business reviews where they will talk about our roadmap and potential use cases.

We've had many sit-down conversations with the Automation Anywhere team when we were testing out the document automation. We gave them feedback about potential enhancements, so when we launched our most recent document automation use case, the capabilities were already there. We didn't need to come up with a workaround or put the project on hold because the things we needed were unavailable. That commitment to customer success stands out because they know that without us, the product won't succeed. 

Vale is one of the largest mining companies in the world and Automation Anywhere is our primary process automation tool. We're using it globally across several branches and locations. There are multiple processes involved in mining, transporting, and shipping iron ore that benefit from process automation. We can also automate our corporate use cases, such as finance, HR, and back office processes. Automation Anywhere is integrated with our core company systems, including SAP solutions and some in-house applications we've built. 

Automation Anywhere enables us to standardize and replicate operations and processes. We have a lot of repetitive processes that are time-consuming to perform manually. We aim to increase productivity and save time for our business users. Over five years, we've saved about 68,000 hours. Automation Anywhere integrates well with our workflows and business applications. We haven't had any issues.

We see some cost savings, but we also tend to think of cost avoidance. We have some compliance and regulatory processes that need to be completed in a timely fashion to avoid fines and taxation on top of that. Our CoE is responsible for a critical portion of the automation. In addition to thinking of how we can automate existing processes, we create new processes. When you automate something that isn't optimized, the results aren't as good. 

We like Automation Anywhere's Citizen Developer program. We've been doing this for a while now. It helps to expand platform adoption within our company and encourage more people to use it. It has been good to see the engagement. We've done some events and hackathons and hope to do another one in November.  We like having an easy tool to share with our business users. 

It isn't hard for business users without technical skills to use Automation Anywhere. We've received positive feedback from them, saying it was an easy tool to learn, especially with the latest version. We set up a training program, and new developers can learn the basics in around a week and start programming bots in three weeks to a month. 

We are currently doing some PoCs for generative AI and trying to see if it fits, but we're also concerned about the safety of our users and information security, so our approach is always conservative. We don't want to do anything that creates unnecessary risk for the company. 

Our users would like more online community forums where they can exchange information. I would also like a better way to monitor and manage all the automations we have running within our systems because our CoE governance must be robust so we are always aware of what's happening.  

We have used Automation Anywhere since 2018.

There have been some changes in personnel over the years, but they have always been great people who provide excellent service and solve problems quickly.

We previously used Microsoft Power Automate.

The platform was not hard to deploy, but each company has its own security protocols to deal with. Once we worked through all the security requirements, it was straightforward. Automation Anywhere requires some maintenance. 

In the first year, we needed to adjust the size of the machines and optimize the bots. However, it hasn't required much maintenance since then. We developed some better processes in CoE governance to develop and track the bots, so it's much easier now. We set up alerts that send us messages when the bots have errors. 

In 2018, we looked at some other products on the market, but Automation Anywhere was a perfect fit. We didn't have any issues that Automation Anywhere couldn't solve. The critical factor for us was its ease of use. We liked the drag-and-drop interface and the low-code capabilities.

I rate Automation Anywhere eight out of 10. 

We use Automation Anywhere to automate tasks throughout the company, enabling our employees to be more productive and conduct more analysis.

We can save money by implementing automations. Before implementing Automation Anywhere, we had a lot of repetitive tasks that weren't adding value. It improved morale by automating some of the boring, repetitive tasks, allowing our employees to focus on more creative, meaningful work.

I like Automation Anywhere's development interface. Our developers love it because it's easier to learn, and they can pick it up quicker than the other tools. We can integrate Automation Anywhere with Slack to get alerts from our bots. 

It's also integrated with our core banking application and many legacy applications that we could not integrate without the Automation Anywhere platform. Around 70 percent of our environment is integrated with it. The integration is fast and seamless. Integrating tools through the APIs is simple, reliable, and efficient. 

We have a lot of ideas for leveraging Automation Anywhere's AI capabilities. For example, we use it to conduct analysis for our clients. We can use it to check a lot of documents. It can not only read but write documents. Using AI, we can run checks to see if a customer has been approved for credit. 

It can help this process go faster, and we can enhance our employee's potential by augmenting their analysis with AI. We are already using generative AI. It has been a huge success because we are using it like a copilot to improve our employees' potential. We can scale it faster with another process in the automation manager. 

We have developers, so all of our team has technical knowledge. However, Automation Anywhere's learning platform is comprehensive and it's easy to learn things on your own. Many of our developers didn't know anything about the platform, but it was easy for them to learn and become fully productive. 

I think there are some opportunities to improve integration with monitoring tools already on the market to make this even faster. We struggle a little when applying the upgrades because the control room has some flaws. That's one advantage of migrating to the cloud. If we do that, then we don't have to upgrade manually. There is a SaaS option, but we decided to opt for on-prem and perform the upgrades ourselves. We're thinking of choosing the cloud options in the next version to make it easier. 

We have used Automation Anywhere since 2022.

Automation Anywhere is highly scalable. That's one of its advantages. It's easier to scale than other solutions. We are a financial institution serving around 26 million clients with only 3,000 employees. We need automation to attend to our operational tasks. Otherwise, it would be challenging to manage all of our clients

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of 10. The local support in Brazil could improve. While it has gotten better in the last few months, we've struggled as a global company trying to contact them sometimes. 

Positive

The initial deployment took three months, but it took a year to change the legacy bots to Automation Anywhere. We decided to automate new projects that would yield more ROI before finishing the migration of our legacy bots. 

We get a significant ROI even though the licensing cost is higher than average. The gains we realize from the initial development make up for it. In the last three years, I estimate we have saved around 2,200 hours of labor. To date, we've saved almost $6 million. 

The cost of Automation Anywhere is fine. 

We looked at two other solutions before making the decision to choose Automation Anywhere. One reason was reliability. When we implemented it, Automation Anywhere was already a widely used and popular tool. It has high availability, which is one requirement for a banking solution. It's also easy to learn, use, and implement. We looked at the leaders in Gartner's, such as Blue Prism and UiPath. Automation Anywhere stood out for its development interface. 

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10.