Automation Anywhere is a leading global RPA solution provider. Its platform is used by companies worldwide, including many Fortune 500 enterprises. Automation Anywhere is known for its innovative approach to automation, offering both cloud-based and on-premises solutions. It specializes in developing bots to streamline operational and business processes, making it a prominent player in the RPA market.

Automation Anywhere can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid platform.

We implemented Automation Anywhere to streamline our operational processes and automate repetitive, mundane tasks. Our bots operate in both attended and unattended modes. In attended mode, bots collaborate with human operators; in unattended mode, they autonomously execute tasks from start to finish. These bots work 24/7 without human intervention. Automation Anywhere is particularly valuable in the BFSI and IT operations sectors, where it can significantly automate business processes. Our enterprise currently utilizes over 5,000 bots daily, resulting in substantial cost savings and improved efficiency. The cloud-based platform's seamless integration capabilities and regular product updates ensure its continued leadership in the automation market.

Due to data protection concerns, the financial services industry has not fully embraced cloud technology. However, the retail and healthcare sectors have migrated to the cloud and identified significant opportunities. Real estate, vertical healthcare, and smart city transportation are well-suited for cloud adoption. These industries often face a high risk of human error. Automating processes end-to-end with RPA bots can mitigate errors, enhance company value, and streamline human work. Cloud-based RPA allows for easy scaling of bots to meet fluctuating workloads, ensuring efficient and cost-effective operations, even during peak demand.

Automation Anywhere makes it easy for business users without coding skills. It offers a low-code product that allows citizen developers to create bots without writing a single line of code. These developers can drag and drop information to automate activities, streamlining tasks like financial operations and daily routines. By providing basic details about the properties they need to operate, citizen developers can quickly build bots that can be deployed to production and triggered manually or automatically. This technology empowers individuals to create multiple bots tailored to specific needs, such as HR bots or onboarding processes. In the financial industry, it facilitates daily validation activities and data transfers between servers.

The learning curve for creating basic bots is approximately one week for non-technical users. However, complex bot creation requires coding knowledge, typically in Python, C#, or DLL. For those with a background in backend coding, such as C# or Python, an additional month may be needed to understand the intricacies of RPA or Automation Anywhere fully. The learning time ranges from one week to one month, depending on the individual's skill level. 

Automation Anywhere's new version introduces Copilot, a feature that allows users to create a basic bot for a specific task. These bots can be deployed into a production environment with minimal adjustments, leveraging AI capabilities.

Copilot's seamless integration with our organization's daily applications will be valuable as we transition to an AI platform. This integration will significantly enhance productivity, accelerate our automation efforts, and reduce time to market. Additionally, Copilot will enable us to create a multitude of bots more efficiently.

Copilot can significantly reduce our staff's workload by generating templates for bots. These templates require only input parameters to be specified, saving up to 30 percent of their time.

AI currently offers a variety of APIs that can be combined to create customized strategies tailored to specific customer needs for service provision and operations. By leveraging generative AI and advanced tools like generative AI bots or Copilots, businesses can develop and deploy automated processes to streamline daily activities. By carefully identifying non-automatable processes, generative AI can assist in addressing these challenges and improving overall efficiency.

Automation Anywhere's versatility allows for seamless integration with various tools and applications. It can effectively communicate with any system, and APIs can be developed to facilitate communication with any desired tool. There are no limitations to its integration capabilities. Its user-friendly interface and well-maintained documentation make it easy to follow and create bots for automation on any platform. CI/CD pipelines can be used to deploy these bots efficiently.

Automation Anywhere offers packages that can seamlessly integrate automation into our workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents. By extracting operational activities and pushing them to databases, we can enhance bot productivity and improve overall business efficiency.

Cognitive services and PDF file automation should be refined. The integration process should be simplified, perhaps using API-based activities. If a response comes in JSON format, these features should be readily available, allowing for easy information extension. This will enable developers to perform tasks and view accurate results quickly.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for almost six years.

The stability of Automation Anywhere is not a concern when deployed on the cloud. 

Automation Anywhere's ability to scale automation is impressive. We will begin by identifying business processes and then involve subject matter experts to determine the number of bots required and their priorities. This will guide our automation journey, which can commence immediately. Licensing and deployment will be swift, especially if cloud-based. On-premises deployment depends on our infrastructure. The entire bot facility can be ready within a week. For development, a dedicated center of excellence team can prioritize bots and commence activities accordingly.

The deployment complexity largely depends on the integration process. If integration is straightforward, a citizen developer can acquire the necessary skills within one to seven days and begin developing. For complex analyses, prior knowledge of external environments, such as C# or Python programming languages, can significantly reduce the required code length within the Automation Anywhere platform. While Automation Anywhere doesn't offer a traditional coding structure, it supports integrating other languages and components, enabling activities with fewer lines of code.

Automation Anywhere offers a subscription-based licensing model for cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployments. A single license allows for 24/7 bot execution, whether performing a single task or multiple tasks at various times on a single machine.

I rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten. It is one of the top three RPA solutions.

Users need at least two years of experience in a specific coding language for complex automation scenarios. This is a requirement. They will primarily work on integration, as Automation Anywhere bots do not handle this completely. Writing code to call external APIs or web services requires thorough knowledge. Users can create Python code to add to bots for triggers. For complex bots, at least four years of experience is needed, not just in automation but also in other areas. This knowledge helps with architecture, bot execution, and future scaling. To create reusable structures and portions, users should start by drilling down and identifying them. These reusable components can be used in multiple bots or processes. This approach can simplify complex scenarios by breaking them down into smaller, repeatable tasks. To handle such complexity, users should have at least four years of experience in a typical development environment.

There are two distinct approaches to upgrading Automation Anywhere. Automation Anywhere handles the upgrade process for its cloud-based solution whenever a new release becomes available. However, on-premises upgrades require scheduling a call with Automation Anywhere to plan the process. It's crucial to have a well-defined disaster recovery plan in place for on-premises upgrades. This plan allows Automation Anywhere to maintain a single active platform for upgrades while ensuring the other platform remains available for production. Once the upgrade is complete, the other platform can then be upgraded. In contrast, cloud-based customers can rely on Automation Anywhere to manage the upgrade process without additional effort.

Every day, technology evolves. Maintenance is necessary when components change, or new versions are released because specific code segments may become obsolete. We must closely monitor the entire ecosystem for errors and swiftly resolve them. Bugs can sometimes arise due to technical coding, so we must address these issues or share detailed platform information with Automation Anywhere for their analysis. If a core issue is identified, they will take the necessary steps to resolve it. They may request that clients modify their environment, application, or component handling for technology or third-party matters.

The maintenance requirements for Automation Anywhere vary depending on the situation. Minor issues can be quickly identified and reported to Automation Anywhere, who will respond within 24-48 hours based on the purchased services. Our system administrator can resolve minor issues. Audits may be conducted in a development environment, where estimates for time and effort can be determined. Cost and time estimates are not fixed and depend on the specific issue.

The bots are maintained daily.

We obtain use cases from the business and optimize their solutions by implementing Lean Six Sigma methodologies to eliminate process waste. We then follow this with end-to-end automation that requires no manual intervention. Automation Anywhere is the tool we employ to achieve this.

Our goal is not to solve problems but to automate manual tasks previously performed by humans. Rule-based processes require minimal human decision-making and are ideal candidates for automation. By using Automation Anywhere, we aim to replace repetitive human labour with machine efficiency.

For example, a business user performs the same routine daily: logging in, analyzing Excel data, and responding to customer emails. This repetitive manual work is ideal for automation. We use the Automation Anywhere tool to build a bot that mimics these human actions. The bot logs in, processes emails, responds to customers, and completes the entire process autonomously, from start to finish.

We use generative AI to process emails by determining customer sentiment and intent: happy, inquiring, dissatisfied, or angry. The AI makes decisions based on email content and automatically generates requests or tickets in ServiceNow, assigning them to appropriate users. This automation replaces the manual task of sifting through thousands of daily customer emails, allowing employees to focus on higher-value work. The combination of generative AI and Automation Anywhere automates this process efficiently.

Automation Anywhere increased productivity by 30 percent.

Automation Anywhere has significantly re-emerged in the industry over the past few years. The platform has introduced numerous features and a robust cloud deployment pipeline. The initial focus is on a cloud-based architecture and a new structure supporting third-party coding languages like Python, VBScript, and VBA. Document Automation, formerly IQ Bot, simplifies document automation development. Additionally, Automation Anywhere acquired Shibumi, rebranded as CWE Manager, to provide a pipeline for automation and offer detailed performance metrics, including ROI, savings, and bot health for business users.

AI is the future, and automation is a crucial component. Our healthcare organization, which manufactures products like gloves and masks and provides in-house hospitality to patients across the US, has significant opportunities for automation and AI implementation. With six data centres globally and a new CIO focused on cost reduction, we're aggressively pursuing cloud migration to Azure and have partnered with Google for AI integration over the next five years. These initiatives aim to streamline operations, reduce costs, and enhance patient care.

Throughout my experience, I have integrated nearly 600 applications with Automation Anywhere, encompassing a diverse range of software, including desktop-based, standalone, and web-based applications.

Automation Anywhere has significantly reduced costs in my organization. For example, a team of 20 employees previously spent six minutes manually entering 20,000 Excel records into an Oracle application daily. This process consumed valuable time and resources, including Oracle licenses and employee wages. Automating this task eliminated the need for one Oracle license by accessing the database directly. Our automation solution processes 10,000 records in just 15 minutes, drastically improving efficiency and accuracy.

Integrating workflows requires careful consideration of automation complexity, determined by the number and type of applications involved and the number of interactions within each application. We assess applications based on web-based vs. standalone, legacy vs. automation-friendly, and the number of fields requiring input. A complexity score is assigned. Zero to ten is low, 11 to 20 is medium, and 21 to 30 is high, and corresponding timelines for development, testing, QA, pilot, and handover are established. Once timelines are set, we focus on securing application access for developers, providing necessary test data, and coordinating with business stakeholders for UAT testing. After successful UAT, the bot is deployed to production for a monitored pilot phase before full-scale implementation. This approach is standard workflow management practice in our organization.

The savings from automation depend on the specific automation implemented. Some automation may provide minimal benefits to the business. For example, if a new automation is introduced and the business user spends only two percent of their time per day on the related task, the savings may be insignificant. To evaluate the ROI, we calculate the costs over five years, including development, support, licensing, and infrastructure setup. In the first year, the focus is on investment and implementation. While savings may not be fully realized in the second year, from the third to fifth year, the business can expect significant returns due to reduced human labor. The automated process can be continuously enhanced to adapt to changing business requirements. My organization has achieved savings of approximately one point five billion over the past year and a half through automation.

Automation Anywhere's most valuable features include generative AI, similar to Copilot, which will significantly benefit developers; low-code or no-code technology; and document automation capable of extracting data from structured and unstructured PDF formats, presenting it clearly and easy to follow. An upcoming feature will also provide graphical representations or dashboards to illustrate cost savings, ROI, and FTE benefits achieved through process automation.

The Copilot recently integrated into Automation Anywhere requires significant refinement and additional features. Essentially, it still necessitates manual review, which is inefficient. For example, instructing Copilot to write code for opening and reading an Excel file generates necessary commands but still requires developer input to specify target data, column numbers, and desired data. This indicates a need for further training to enhance the bot's capabilities.

Integrating Automation Anywhere with existing systems often proves challenging due to the prevalence of legacy applications that are not automation-friendly. Unlike modern applications with easily identifiable elements, these older systems require creative problem-solving to develop reliable and error-resistant automation. This challenge is common across the RPA industry, necessitating innovative approaches to data extraction. For instance, utilizing software development kits, XML files, or APIs can be more efficient than navigating through multiple application pages. Additionally, implementing fuzzy logic scripts is crucial for handling data entry errors, such as name variations, to ensure accurate matching and process success.

The learning landscape for Automation Anywhere offers various certifications and training materials. While the community provides a platform for interaction and resource sharing, not all training content aligns with the specific needs of developers. Additionally, the community forum, though helpful, doesn't always provide timely or comprehensive solutions to user inquiries. The company's internal structure, with multiple product teams, can also complicate the process of obtaining support and resolving issues.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for one year.

I would rate the stability of Automation Anywhere nine out of ten.

Automation Anywhere is a highly scalable tool, particularly evident in its ability to handle user concurrency, as demonstrated in document automation. Its scalability is supported by robust hardware and software requirements, high-performance document and file processing benchmarks, and the capacity to increase or decrease resources to match fluctuating demands flexibly. Essentially, Automation Anywhere empowers businesses to adapt efficiently to changing needs.

Automation Anywhere offers tiered support levels based on partnership status. Gold, silver, and platinum partners receive varying degrees of assistance, including dedicated support teams and prioritized ticket resolution. While their services come at a premium, the benefits include timely responses and efficient problem-solving.

Neutral

I have worked in various industries and have experience automating processes using different automation tools available on the market, including VBA, VBScript, and Python.

Automation Anywhere, while a formidable RPA tool, currently ranks second behind UiPath. Both companies are industry leaders, continually innovating to enhance scalability and reliability. While Automation Anywhere has made significant strides in recent years, UiPath maintains a slight edge in overall market performance. Compared to other available options, Automation Anywhere remains a top choice due to its robust features and reliability.

The deployment process in Automation Anywhere is relatively straightforward. We export the package from one environment and import it into another. However, each organization has its own unique deployment standards, often involving processes like change advisory board approvals. Therefore, the actual deployment method will vary depending on the specific organization's guidelines and procedures.

The overall deployment time for a robot is five minutes. A team was involved in this process. As the developer, I was responsible for obtaining the necessary approvals and moving the robot code from enrolment to deployment. Other organizations may have specific teams dedicated to these tasks. For example, they might have their own Centre of Excellence team that handles all deployments. Therefore, the deployment process can vary depending on the automation and the specific organization. In my current organization, we handle deployments ourselves, while in my previous organization, there was a separate team dedicated to this task. Prior to that, a support engineer typically performed these duties.

Automation Anywhere's pricing is significantly higher than other RPA solutions. We recently conducted a small proof of concept with their generative AI integration and received a quote of $75,000 for one year. In comparison, Microsoft offered a similar solution for only $20,000. This substantial price difference makes Automation Anywhere one of the most expensive RPA options on the market, second only to UiPath.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten.

I would rate the ease of use of Automation Anywhere as a six out of ten for someone without any technical expertise.

The learning curve for non-technical people is two months.

There are several areas for improvement in the implementation of Automation Anywhere. Many employees are reluctant to entrust their tasks to automation due to concerns about job displacement. While this is a common misconception, automation is designed to streamline processes and free up employees to focus on more complex and strategic tasks. From a development perspective, Automation Anywhere continually introduces new features, but there is often a lack of effective communication and training. To maximize the benefits of automation, developers should adopt a proactive approach, seeking creative solutions and considering the user-friendliness of automated processes.

My entire organization has close to 27,000 employees worldwide. Our enterprise team, consisting of 15 members including me, handles automation work for the entire organization. My team consists of six members dedicated to support activities, monitoring and assisting the robots. The remaining members are part of the development team, solely focused on development tasks.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere is a moderately complex task due to the numerous dependencies that must be carefully considered and planned for during any migration or upgrade. Yesterday, we successfully migrated our Automation Anywhere Control Room from version 32 to version 33. Prior to the upgrade, we underwent extensive preparation, including reviewing Change Advisor Reports, obtaining necessary approvals, and coordinating with the database team to create a backup of the Automation Anywhere database. Once these prerequisites were fulfilled, we proceeded to the server, uninstalled version 32, and installed version 33. The previously created backup was then integrated to ensure accurate data reflection in the latest version. While proper planning is essential, the upgrade process is neither overly complex nor excessively straightforward, making it a medium-level task.

We have a team of six dedicated to support and maintenance activities, managing approximately 250 automations across our organization. The level of maintenance required varies depending on the developer's experience and the complexity of the automation. Junior developers may create bots that are more prone to errors, leading to increased maintenance. However, senior developers or well-designed automations typically require less maintenance. In addition to support and maintenance, our team is also responsible for minor enhancements, bug fixes, and upgrades or downgrades of our automation systems.

We don't need to constantly monitor the bot as it runs according to its schedule. It performs its tasks autonomously, but manual intervention is necessary in certain situations. For example, if an expected input file fails to arrive at the scheduled time, the automation process will stop. In such cases, a support engineer must contact the business to address the missing file. Additionally, manual intervention might be required for downstream automation tasks, such as when a front-end UI changes on an application. These situations depend on the specific downstream application, business needs, and other factors.

I would highly recommend Automation Anywhere as a technology solution. I've been involved with it for nearly twelve years and have witnessed its remarkable evolution. From its early stages to its current state, I'm impressed by its potential for future innovation and problem-solving. Moreover, I've seen first-hand how Automation Anywhere has significantly benefited businesses by reducing costs and saving on full-time equivalent labour. In one instance, I observed how a single automation process could accomplish the work of ten people in just one hour.

I use Automation Anywhere to automate the data input process and produce the forecasting output.

We store our data in Databricks, which is sometimes shared via email. To automate this process, I've created a pipeline using Automation Anywhere that extracts CSV files from emails, uploads them to Databricks, saves the resulting table on a selected AWS page, processes the data, and feeds it into the model.

Automation Anywhere is user-friendly, with drag-and-drop features for nontechnical users.

The learning curve is no more than one month.

It integrates well with other tools.

Automation Anywhere saves us one month per year.

Automated data processing is the most valuable feature of Automation Anywhere.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for 16 months.

Automation Anywhere is stable.

Automation Anywhere is scalable.

Automation Anywhere supports automation to scale.

The technical support is good.

Positive

The deployment is straightforward and can be completed within one and two weeks.

Before implementing, we want to ensure we have all the support and collaboration.

Automation Anywhere is affordable.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten because it is practical and user-friendly.

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. 

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 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 use Automation Anywhere to automate specific use cases for our clients. The majority of use cases fall under the logistics and finance departments.

Our organization utilizes Automation Anywhere on the Automation Anywhere private cloud infrastructure.

We implemented Automation Anywhere to automate repetitive tasks and save humans time to focus on other tasks.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use with basic knowledge or training.

The learning curve is easy. We can learn how to use it within one week. There are a lot of courses available for Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere Co-Pilot is designed for situations where humans and bots work together, especially useful when users need to enter specific details during the automation process itself.

It has helped our clients significantly increase their production and has freed up time for employees to work on other tasks.

We have integrated Automation Anywhere with our SQL database.

Adding automation into workflows and APIs is easy.

Automation Anywhere helps save organizations time and money. 

Automation Anywhere's OCR functionality stands out as the most valuable feature for us, as it allows us to swiftly extract data for repetitive tasks, significantly boosting our efficiency.

OCR technology could be more inclusive by offering a wider range of supported languages, as its current selection is limited.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

Automation Anywhere is stable.

Automation Anywhere does a good job of providing automation at scale.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere has impacted our ability to expand across more processes.

There was a time when the technical support was not able to provide an exact solution for my query.

Neutral

While I've used UiPath, I prefer Automation Anywhere for its user-friendly interface and competitive OCR capabilities. Automation Anywhere's bi-directional flow, allowing both graph and sequence views, offers greater clarity compared to UiPath's linear flow.

The initial deployment is straightforward.

I would rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten.

Automation Anywhere requires maintenance and updates semi-annually. For an experienced person, it is an easy task.

We have eight people on our team who utilize Automation Anywhere.

I recommend taking advantage of Automation Anywhere's trial version to thoroughly test its capabilities within your specific environment before committing to a full deployment.