Gartner has identified the RPA market as the fastest-growing segment of the enterprise software market, with additional repetitive manual administrative work as a result of increasing data being cited by many as a primary cause. There are, however, a growing number of industry voices (both end-users and analysts) who are starting to question the potential applications of RPA and its limitations as per a recent Forbes Technology Council article by Travis Green Director of Cross-Portfolio Strategy at Micro Focus.

In his article Green explores the application for which RPA is very effective and where it’s current limitations lie. He comments within the piece “RPA can be effective at replacing manual labour for repetitive tasks where inputs are predictable …”, this is particularly useful for business users who find themselves performing labour intensive and repetitive work on a daily basis because the software applications they use don’t integrate well with each other. Similar to how macros can be recorded in applications such as Excel and Word, RPA can be thought of as a macro recorder and executer for the entire operating system and all applications installed on it. RPA also includes many of the tools expected of a scripting language having the ability to read and write structured data from files and the ability to make calls to web services.