NelsonHall’s new global research report, ‘Business Process Transformation Through RPA & AI‘, reveals major boost to BPO industry

Despite the hype around RPA and AI technologies leading to the death of BPO and offshore delivery, quite the contrary is the case. The introduction of RPA, and subsequently new digital process models, is leading not just to reinvention of services within existing BPO contracts but to increased penetration of the retained and shared services operations within organizations.

At the same time, approximately 80% of RPA & AI-related business process transformation services are delivered from offshore.

The emergence of these new technologies is supporting considerable revenue growth that is particularly marked in those pure-play BPO vendors with high domain focus, and the digital transformation specialists. Indeed, the services market related to RPA & AI-based business process transformation is forecast to grow from $701m in 2017 to $8,130m by 2022, a compound annual average growth rate of 63%, with high double-digit growth forecast across geographies.

In terms of market evolution:

• RPA is currently at the growth stage, with organizations now looking to scale across the organization
• Organizations now face the immediate roadblock in their automation journeys of handling classification of documents and processing of unstructured data
• New digital process models addressing process reimagination and end-to-end straight-through processing are emerging, but in their infancy, with adoption most advanced in the travel sector, followed by healthcare and P&C insurance.

Over the next four years:

• Standalone RPA implementation activity will decrease, with RPA still critical but becoming the execution mechanism embedded within new digital process models
• There will be a major shift towards reimagination of business processes
• Technologies used will move beyond RPA and ML to additionally encompass BPM, SaaS platforms, analytics, DL and new digital technologies such as IoT and blockchain
• External information sources will increasingly be used to supplement cognitive decision-making
• Voice, image, and video processing will become key elements in handling unstructured data
• The principal benefits sought from new business process models will be enhanced customer/user experience together with “minimal touch” straight through processing
• Design thinking for reimagination and UX consultancy will continue to increase in importance
• Domain skills will become dominant in the market for new digital process models
• The ability to develop a concentration of new digital process models within a domain will determine the future market leaders in that domain for business process transformation.

SOURCE NelsonHall