Automation Anywhere Reviews

As a financial institution, a lot of collections activity processing, invoices, and billing related to our collections activities is my primary use case for Automation Anywhere. That's really where I've been focused for these past few weeks. We're expanding into very ground-level things, consolidating reports from multiple systems, doing these basic use cases to start.

The features of Automation Anywhere improve my company by making deployment and maintenance of our automations a smoother process overall. We can make changes much quicker when we need to and it's definitely simpler for other affiliated people in the company to understand, including those who might not be working in the systems daily. It's put together efficiently enough that it's user-friendly for non-professional developers to handle.

The thing I appreciate most about Automation Anywhere is how integrated the aspects of it are. I also worked with another platform in a different company for two years and it wasn't nearly as integrated, and it required a lot of effort and time trying to get everything to communicate together, from version controlling and deployment. The simple act of engaging was more complex. 

Regarding the development environment, I'm really pleased with Automation Anywhere and enjoy using it. One place I find regular struggles is with basic documentation, including details about different commands or applications that are natively in the system. I tend to have to do test development on my own to find answers that should probably be in the documentation. That does slow things down, but once I get the information I need, it's really great to use overall.

To make it a ten, I would suggest more access to basic information, maybe more distributed use of it on the web. I don't find a lot outside of the internal community forum. It doesn't get much attention or use on Stack Overflow or other public community platforms. The responsiveness and amount of community engagement needs improvement. When I post questions, I seldom get answers fast.  When I do, I am usually just directed to the standard documentation, which I have already reviewed and found to be lacking the answers to my questions.

I've been using the solution for two years at my current role, and a total of about four years altogether.

The deployment has been pretty smooth. We haven't had an issue with anything. Mostly, it's getting all of our internal security and things like that locked in so that we can go through.

I don't have any specifics about the pricing. It's not in my area.

We are not using Automation Anywhere AI feature set at the moment. We just took the training courses in the past few weeks and are learning about it, and I'm hoping to get hands-on sessions to get experience using the tools.  Right now, we're looking forward to developing some use cases that we can start engaging.

The biggest challenges for me and my company in the age of AI stem from being a financial institution and credit union, which creates a particularly conservative environment. This takes more evangelism to get adopted, as financial institutions tend to have more regulatory compliance issues that we must be very conscientious of, so we have to proceed slower on that front.

AI governance is definitely getting attention and discussion in my company. Everyone has accepted that it's going to be a huge part of the landscape in the very near future, so it's important to ensure we have everything managed and planned within compliance for protecting private, personal information.

With our department structure, I personally don't utilize the Automation Anywhere COE, or Center of Excellence manager. I believe our managers and business analysts do, but that's not something as a developer I get involved with.

We haven't deployed any document automation in our current processes. We've done extensive exploration and have paid contracts for a certain number of documents, but we haven't had a beneficial, deployable use case yet. We know they're there, but we have easier tasks to tackle first.

Overall, I'd give Automation Anywhere probably an eight on a scale from one to ten.

We attempted to implement this solution into the back-office business processes of various entities.

The program itself is phenomenal in terms of its design. It solves a lot of different issues. It cuts down on the need for large accounting personnel groups within organizations because it automates back-end office processes, such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, and just all those types of things. I am a CPA, so I see the potential benefit of Automation Anywhere being implemented within a business structure.

What Automation Anywhere is offering is amazing from a back-end office accounting standpoint. If implemented correctly, it is amazing.

I have not integrated it with any other solution. I have only been focused on backend office automation, but I know it has that capability because I have trained in it. I have built the bots. It is amazing if it works properly. I consider myself a fairly intelligent person who has been in the accounting field since the eighties, and it is truly revolutionary.

I like the holistic approach of the company to automation. Many automation software solutions focus on only one area. I am particularly talking about back-office processes such as accounting, AR, AP, treasury management, financial statement forecasting, presentation, budgeting, and similar areas. That's where my expertise lies. I appreciate that it automates all these processes. 

The learning curve is an issue in terms of implementation and writing scripts, which is a challenge. Although it is advertised as easy to implement, it is not. It is not easy to learn or implement. However, if you have the IT staff and are willing to invest the time to learn it, then it is worth it. You need the planning and the capability to hire the appropriate people to implement Automation Anywhere. It is not as easy to implement as advertised. It is difficult across the board. It is difficult for technical and non-technical users.

I am still in the learning stages. I attempted to implement it with a client, but the client did not move forward with it because it was too costly and too difficult to implement without the significant assistance of Automation Anywhere. The issue with Automation Anywhere is that the majority of their help staff or technical staff seems to be offshore, not located in the United States. That is, in my opinion, an issue for companies. In addition to that, it is for companies that are very large. It is not for mid-level and below companies because it is too expensive. It is unfortunate. I could sell a bunch of it if it was affordable. So, the fact that the majority of their staff is offshore making it difficult to get technical support from them and the fact that it is unaffordable to anything other than the Nikes of the world is an issue in the United States.

I have been using Automation Anywhere since June 2024.

I've attempted to engage with customer service, but it is difficult and a drawback. For instance, my partner and I did extensive training on the university to get certifications so we could be approved as resellers. The process had many glitches, and verifying our passed certification exams took weeks, something that should be a simple button press. For an entity promoting automation, there was no automation involved in that process, which is a red flag.

Neutral

In terms of return on investment, the benefit is realized economically because you may not need as many employees, reducing personnel expenses. For example, if you have seven people in accounts payable, you might reduce that number to three if Automation Anywhere is implemented and monitored properly, so the savings can be realized right away.

The software also minimizes errors, unlike humans, who may lose focus during routine tasks. The speed at which the automation bot operates compared to a human delivers significant cost savings and return on investment.

I've also used Topalti, an accounts payable automated solution. Topalti has prewritten all the scripts and done everything needed, unlike Automation Anywhere, where I would have to do everything manually. However, Topalti only focuses on accounts payable for certain industries.

A major issue is that a large percentage of their help staff is offshore, which is problematic for U.S.-based companies. It is also more suitable for very large companies, not mid-level or smaller companies, as it is too expensive. 

I could sell more if it were affordable. 

The two main issues are the difficulty in obtaining technical support and the fact that it's unaffordable for anything other than very large companies. 

Overall, I rate the product ten out of ten, the sales channels four out of ten, and the support four out of ten.

The main use cases for Automation Anywhere involve automating manually repeated and mundane tasks. I'm currently working for a manufacturing company, and we consider use cases that can replace humans with RPA bots for automation.

We are using document automation in our current process, with two use cases for extracting data from invoices. We tried both digital copies and scanned copies, and while I initially saw hallucination data, after continually training the model, the data is now getting accurate.

Currently in RPA, I have almost eight plus years of experience, and I have worked extensively in Automation Anywhere. As a developer, I started my journey as a developer, and now I am a solution architect.

Productivity-wise, I am seeing a lot of difference; there is a huge difference in efficiency as well. We are saving almost four FTEs, and it is far better in terms of savings.

The document automation is saving almost 50% of the time.

An example of how it helped the organization involves the automated documents we implemented almost six months back. Their two use cases are in production now, and we are seeing the value generated every month, which makes us happy, and we plan to enhance it further for other suppliers as well; currently, we have it for 15 suppliers.

The main challenge I face with Agentic Process Automation is identifying a use case. This challenge arises because wherever I'm working, in the manufacturing company, we have so many legacy systems without APIs, making it impossible to automate end-to-end; only specific paths of the process can be automated through traditional automation, which needs to be addressed before moving toward agentic automation.

Currently, we are working with Automation Anywhere to overcome these challenges, but it is worth noting that even Automation Anywhere encounters the same problem. They have a tool that we can use to automate end-to-end processes, but when it comes to APIs, Automation Anywhere cannot help due to the legacy systems, which require the company to either create APIs for those systems or migrate to other enterprise systems to resolve the challenge.

We have explored the AI Agent Studio in our automation process, and we have done some POCs with a couple of use cases that created value for us. However, we have encountered some technical challenges, which is why we haven't proceeded with production yet.

When it comes to the integration experience with the features in AI Agent Studio, I have faced a couple of challenges. I tested it almost six months back, during which I encountered issues integrating with my Windows applications. By now, I believe those challenges have been rectified.

Automation Anywhere needs to focus primarily on agentic automation. They have APIs, but the effectiveness of those APIs depends on the value they create. I tested this API almost six months back but not recently, so traditional automation has reached its limits, requiring a shift to agentic automation.

Currently in RPA, I have almost eight plus years of experience, and I have worked extensively in Automation Anywhere.

I have not seen any downtime or crashes or any problems recently. Earlier, when we had version 11.x of Automation Anywhere, we encountered a couple of issues, but after upgrading to 360, there have been no problems, and everything looks good.

The main reasons I do not change tools are related to the scalability of Automation Anywhere, which I find to be the best tool with no performance-related issues. We have around 200 automations running daily without any challenges, and performance-wise, everything is good.

I did not consider another solution before adopting Automation Anywhere, as I started my journey in RPA using Automation Anywhere from the very beginning until now.

From my perspective, AI governance plays a key role in every organization; otherwise, it could easily get out of hand.

The compliance feature of AI Agent Studio meets our needs depending on the guardrails each organization sets up concerning compliance; it varies based on what guardrails they put in place.

My organization is completely focused on data integrity, and they are very particular about compliance, which is one reason they are taking a step-by-step approach. They first conduct POCs and test the tools from Automation Anywhere or other vendors to check what kind of compliance can be enabled before onboarding them.

I have not utilized the Autopilot capabilities or automator AI.

We have a COE Manager, and I understand it helps us understand the revenue generated across the bots we have developed. Unfortunately, we have not taken that license, but I think it is now offered free of cost within the existing licenses. However, we are not actively using it.

Currently, we are doing manual deployment, so automating that step would be more helpful.

I would rate this product 8 out of 10.

I've been working in the IT department team, and my use cases are mainly about automating most of the repetitive tasks using bots. 

At first, I was using tools such as Blue Prism and UiPath, and when I did the comparison between Automation Anywhere and the previous tools, I saw a great change and impact, especially in the user-friendly interface. The interaction with the tool is quite good. 

Automation Anywhere is quite easy to use for users who are not technical, especially business users.

Automation Anywhere has helped with productivity, especially in the delivery time because while working in the IT department, interacting with the finance department and the HR data entry, it helped me deliver quick results. I was automating the roles from the HR data entry and the finance department.

By using Automation Anywhere, I have seen a great change in my time savings and in delivering my product. 

Its licensing can become too expensive for a small startup company. 

During deployment or initial development, more elaboration about particular features of Automation Anywhere would be helpful when knowledge is limited.

I've been using the Automation Anywhere tool for around two years and six months.

The performance of Automation Anywhere is quite fast and good. 

Regarding scalability in Automation Anywhere, I was working on a small project initially, and I'm currently on a large project. If I compare the efficiency of handling both projects small and large, I can say that it fully accommodates the scalability of projects depending on their size.

I have never contacted the technical support or customer support of Automation Anywhere because when I visit the FAQs and through the guides of the bots such as ChatGPT and Co-pilot, I've been getting my solution. I haven't encountered a significant problem that would require contacting support. In the future, I'm looking forward to having a conversation with support if I encounter any difficulties.

Positive

Before I started using Automation Anywhere, I was using the Blue Prism software. Comparing the features I have interacted with most in Automation Anywhere, I would say that Automation Anywhere is the best option. When comparing the cost, user-friendly interaction, automation, and quick delivery of results, I've seen a huge impact compared to Blue Prism.

It was easy. The full deployment of Automation Anywhere took approximately three to four weeks.

Updates are done automatically, so maintenance is not hard to handle. 

It required approximately five people for the deployment of Automation Anywhere.

As a beginner, I would suggest starting with small workflows, as starting with a huge workflow can become overwhelming.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten.

We have built over 75 automations with Automation Anywhere across various teams in the organization, delivering a high value for our internal teams. We have explored a couple of process transformations with Automation Anywhere using their IQ bots and AI automation tools.

We have integrated applications like SAP ECC, One Source Automation, and SharePoint using Python code. Our company has 25 AA developers. 

AA improves process consistency and reduces human error. We have saved our clients considerable time using Automation Anywhere. While we don't assess the dollar savings, we look at the amount of time saved per project. The tasks were previously completed by hand, but Automation Anywhere enabled a lot of process automation, giving users automation that runs around the clock. For example, we can automate processes to address point-in-time reports so a user doesn't need to wake up at midnight to handle these issues. 

We haven't gotten approval to implement AI, but when we do, I believe it will accelerate the time savings we realize through automation. We will work with other teams to show them the value of AI and automation. 

Automation Anywhere's most valuable feature is its ease of use. It's easy to envision a solution or process to transform with Automation Anywhere from end to end. We can realize the value much faster because it's easy to use and understand. 

All the features are impressive. We haven't had a chance to use the Copilot or other AI features, but the studio is great. It's the platform where we build the bots. The IQ Bot used to be excellent, but the IQ Bot isn't available anymore. I believe it's document automation, which is also very good.

Anyone at any level can use Automation Anywhere. Once you get the hang of it, it's highly intuitive, and the learning curve is short. We started seeing value from Automation Anywhere within a month or so after implementation, but that was with the older version. It's even faster now that everything is on the web.

Training employees using the courses takes a couple of weeks, followed by another week or so of hands-on learning on the platform. It takes about four weeks to onboard a user.

Automation Anywhere can improve its integration. For example, you can't directly integrate Automation Anywhere with SharePoint or third-party applications seamlessly. Adding seamless third-party integration would add a lot of value to the platform. We need to use APIs or Python coding to integrate the third-party applications. If Automation Anywhere could add some connectors, that would be great. 

I'd love to see the ability to build web or mobile applications that are integrated with Automation Anywhere bots, so that a user can work on a web interface directly. Then, it can be linked to the Automation Anywhere bots in the background. They just hit a button, and all the data or information will be used by the bot to do some process in the back end.

We have used Automation Anywhere for five years.

We've never had any issues with stability.

It's easy to build automations and scale Automation Anywhere.

I rate Automation Anywhere support 10 out of 10. The tech support is great. We have a CSM we can contact for information, and they're very responsive. 

Positive

We use the SaaS model of Automation Anywhere, so the deployment was easy. We set up the infrastructure in under a week. We worked closely with the Automation Anywhere folks because we wanted a clean slate. We didn't want to migrate from the older version to the SaaS edition and took it as an opportunity to clean up the bots. It didn't require much effort, and only two people were involved. The upgrade process was simple. Maintenance is minimal. It only takes a couple of people to maintain 75 bots. 

Automation Anywhere's pricing is excellent.

I rate Automation Anywhere nine out of 10. I would recommend it to others. It's intuitive and easy to implement. 

I currently work with both UiPath and Automation Anywhere. I mostly employ these tools for RPA automation use cases. For example, I can handle any kind of manual invoice processing, document automation, or any manual processes involving multiple business logic and applications.

I think the automation creation is very straightforward. It is drag and drop, with no need to write any code. It is very self-explanatory, making it easy for non-technical users to develop. Also, the overall platform is easy to navigate and learn, making it simple to adapt and use. As I automate manual processes, it helps reduce efforts, leading to financial savings because the speed at which I process has improved. Additionally, I have been able to redirect some headcounts to other work areas, such as research. This has yielded financial benefits by reducing the headcount on these processes. Normally, it takes three to six months post-development and moving to production to realize the benefits of each automation. Since implementing Appia, I have seen significant benefits within a couple of years.

The platform has good capabilities, but it could improve by providing more development options. Currently, it is really restricted to whatever its own ecosystem provides. Aligning the product more closely with a framework, such as the .NET framework or the standard coding practices in other languages, would simplify adaptation for regular developers. It would be beneficial if the platform provided options for power developers to integrate seamlessly with languages like Java or C#, allowing them to write their own scripts and code.

I have been using the solution for about five or six years.

So far, the solution is good and stable, without much downtime experienced.

Organizations can onboard this platform and scale their automation journey because it is very easy to adapt and set up. They can seamlessly integrate with most business automation processes and use the platform to automate their processes on those applications.

I believe the support is on par with industry standards. The SLAs are based on the criticality and compare well with other companies in the market. I would rate them around nine.

Positive

I was previously using UiPath. The switch was mostly due to cost factors, specifically regarding licensing. Otherwise, in terms of capabilities and the platform, WebKit is also a great platform.

The initial setup is somewhere in the middle, neither very complex nor very straightforward.

I had a team for deployment, coordinated by our infrastructure team. The whole team, including five engineers, was involved.

In terms of percentages, costs depend on the complexity and size of the processes. On average, I have managed to reduce spends by up to fifty or sixty percent relative to our budget.

I evaluated Blue Prism and other tools like WorkFusion, among others. However, I found the Automation Anywhere to be more capable and easier to migrate than UiPath.

My advice is to evaluate and compare with other products available in the market. If someone is looking for an automation platform that's easy to adapt, easy to set up, and competitively priced in terms of licensing, they can definitely choose this product. With courses available in Automation Anywhere University, it should not take more than a month to learn properly and try it out. I have Automation Copilot, similar to MS Copilot, to help developers build code based on prompts. I haven't fully utilized it yet. I would give the overall product a rating of nine out of ten.

We were in finance before, so all of our use cases have been in finance. Recently, we have grown out to IT. Our use cases now encompass HR, IT, legal, and everything that we can.

There have been numerous improvements in the organization. We have saved hours and time and hard dollars. In the first year, we saved over half a million dollars. That was about six months of time. After that, we have done at least three million year over year, and we have increased that very much. As far as time saved, it is well over 10,000 hours in the first year alone, and we continue to grow. This year, we are projecting 30,000 manual hours saved.

Prior to the implementation of Automation Anywhere, we had lots and lots of manual work. People would go into Excel and copy data from one master sheet to many sheets. They would compile data. They would take lots of time to do these things. Today, they can go in, press a button, and launch it. They can download hundreds and thousands of invoices, whereas previously, they used to do it manually. One of our use cases saved two people four days a week of time, which is 32 hours each. We now do that automatically in six hours.

The learning curve is initially a little daunting, but after you are in there and you understand how it works, it is very seamless. It is very easy to pick up and very intuitive, and then from there, it is pretty much you go and get your hands dirty.

The tools that we integrate with Automation Anywhere so far have been Python scripts and PowerShell. We have got Power Automate and Power Flows from Microsoft. We are starting to do some cognitive RPA. We are implementing OpenAI through Azure. We have got a lot of that going right now.

The integration with all of the documents and APIs is very seamless. There are packages available in the store if you do not have the integration built-in out of the box. They are available to everyone. Everything that we have been able to use has been just drag and drop. We can just pop in our credentials and be done.

Automation Anywhere has affected us in a positive way in terms of employee capacity and compliance. We have not had to backfill roles. We have not necessarily replaced people, and that is by intent. We did not want to replace people, but we also did not want to have to backfill people. We wanted people to focus on things that they value and be more productive instead of doing mind-numbing things that get no value, but they just have to do it.

Our time and cost savings have been immense since the beginning. In our first year, after we started launching the bots in June or July of 2019, we saved half a million dollars and 10,000 man-hours. Since then, we have grown more than 70% year over year. This year, we are on track to go up to about 40,000 man-hours saved and more than three million hard dollars saved.

They have been able to provide automation at scale pretty well. We fired up and started off with only three production machines. We are now up at five. Officially, we were going up to seven as of next week. We have heard about people here at the Imagine conference who, for example, have hundreds, so the point is proven, and the facts are there. They can scale up very quickly.

The main Automation Anywhere Program offering we use is Pathfinder. We have not utilized our partner services or anything like that, but Pathfinder has been great. Their user groups have been great. To be able to focus and see the product launches beforehand has always been advantageous. The ability to see that has been good.

The features that we found most valuable have been just automating manual processes. We are able to integrate and work with applications that users typically work with. That has been the best feature for us right now. 

Some of the biggest improvements they can make are with the interface. It can be improved in terms of usability or searching for something. For example, icons are hard to find. Typically, you jump into the search box, but being able to go in and find things quickly with the eye could be very valuable.

We have been using Automation Anywhere since 2019. It has been five years.

The stability of the solution has been great so far. It has been very resilient. Obviously, it depends on how you build it. You can obviously make a bad solution and it is going to be bad, but the uptime has been amazing. We have not had any issues with the cloud service since we moved to A360. It has been great since then.

I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten. There is some room for improvement. A lot of that depends on who you talk to. You have a great person and you have a not-so-great person. 

On the client support, so far, their service has been a ten out of ten. We have had amazing reps who I have worked with, and I have nothing bad to say about them.

I did not use a similar solution previously.

We use a mix of on-prem and cloud devices. We are exploring Microsoft Azure to go to it soon, but we are not using it today.

The deployment experience was a little bit frustrating at first, but I was not the one involved. Our architects were having issues, but we engaged with the Automation Anywhere solutions engineers. We were on the phone for maybe an hour or two hours and they fixed it. The deployment was great.

Our ROI is time saved and money saved. This has just been massive, and we continue to grow. We will be growing in the future, especially after this year.

There has been a half-million-dollar return on investment in the first six months alone. We will be up to three million this year. That is our projection, and I think we are going to exceed that.

The evaluation was done before I got here, but I know the company did evaluate UiPath, Blue Prism, Kofax, and a few others. They evaluated the top Gartner Quadrant applications.

My favorite aspect of the Imagine event is being able to see what other customers are doing, not just networking but seeing the presentations, the breakout sessions, and seeing how other companies are doing the same challenges and maybe way better. It is a good time to go and reach out and ask them how they are doing something or how they are scaling up. For example, one company here has managed to scale up to more than 800 bots. They do something with Azure where they turn on a machine, and it is very cost-effective. That is solving some of the problems that we have.

The Imagine experience has been great. This is my second year here. It has been fun. It is helpful to learn. We have done a lot, so I really enjoyed the entire experience.

I got one of my direct reports here for the first time this year. Some of the things or the reasons I did tell him to come were:

• Being able to network
• Being able to learn from others and see how they do things
• Being able to talk to people who have the same challenges that we have and being able to figure out how to do it better

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten.

We have a pretty big shop nowadays. We have 324 automations in production. Our use cases were concentrated on loan services. Most recently, our initiatives have been targeted in the control space - automating the things that make the bank go around and seeing that the bank is in a good position every day. 

We have a backlog in the hundreds, automation is not something that we'll finish anytime soon. It's definitely a marathon to finish all the things that we need to do.

In 2017, there was a lot of hype around RPA. They paved the way for us to see those benefits, and we continue to grow every year. 

In those early days, we had 28 automations in our first year. We thought we were pretty proud of that number. In 2023, we created over 100 automations in a single year and moved those to production. The volume and the increased capacity for our businesses improved. The employee engagement, when we talk about bots now, is much better. It's "how can we help?" There are no real concerns of "They're going to replace our jobs." Over seven years, our automations have grown, and we've matured with them. 

There are several aspects that we value. The control rooms, monitoring the performance, and making sure everything is up and running has been a great feature. From the design and capacity of the developers' perspective, the intuitive interface is excellent. It's a workflow-driven design session. Following the flow of the users alongside the code makes for an easy automation that everyone can understand.

Automation Anywhere brings in and changes the way we do process automation. Everything was very manual beforehand. We'd have to do batch processes where integrations of systems were pretty costly and took a lot of time. Mapping database fields from screens down to the next system was more difficult versus with Automation Anywhere, you get the visual input of the screens. You can click on those fields and not have to do the data mapping or extract them. You can correlate them to other systems almost instantly individually. 

Automation Anywhere is easy to pick up for business users. Initially, we trained 45 people. Whoever raised their hands, we said, "We'll train you." About 65% of those initial trainees were from the business side. A couple of years later, we noticed that the people who created the automation did really well. They were receiving promotions. Then, all of a sudden, we didn't have the people to support our automation needs since those original trainees moved up. We made a shift and said, "Hey, business users, you want to come to technology? We're going to centralize development." 13 said yes, and we kept building out. Now we're a team that's 40-strong.

The learning curve is pretty quick. Automation Anywhere provides a lot of training courses to support you and there are individuals assigned to your account. The learning curve is short from our standpoint. We spend two weeks with anyone who comes in, whether they're a previous developer or a business person. We find that simple automations can be completed within that training period. Within six months, some of the most complex items people are able to handle.

Right now, our 324 automations touch around 120 different systems. Our core platforms are integrated. APIs are being used for SharePoint or imaging systems so  thatwe don't really have a reliance on the UI. With the integrations, we just continue to grow. 

The integration of Automation Anywhere into our workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents is great. There are several phases to this one. Automation Anywhere, just the design, the tool, allows you to jump in with workflows initially and lay out the complete automation, and then you can get into the details. For us, it's particularly powerful as it aligns with the different systems that we work with, as well as providing connectivity to the underlying systems, seeing the screens to get into the details of that workflow, making for a great design process for our automation.

Our automation program has positively affected our business in terms of employee capacity and compliance. It's affected all areas. When we think of the capacity, I can go back to 2020 in the early days of COVID and with a payment protection program specifically. We had 9,000 tellers who no longer were going into the bank. We pivoted to an SBA program and had those 9,000 tellers calling a variety of small businesses. We still needed 1,000 more people to do the due diligence. That's where RPA shined. We were able to fill that capacity gap and immediately become one of the top three players in the space. 

When I think of just day-to-day employee engagement, we're focused on the controls of the bank. Those happen maybe once a month, once a quarter, once a year. So those are activities that you really have to prep for and document really well. RPA does the same thing over and over really well, and those controls are assured to be done and executed in the same fashion over and over.

Automation Anywhere has helped us save on both time and cost. When we think of we run around 750,000 hours of runtime on bots per year. That would be a significant amount of employees. That's about 450 to 500 employees' worth of work done every day. Just the overall capacity provided by automation would be hard to replace.

Automation Anywhere's ability to provide Automation at scale is impressive. We've obviously pushed that limit. We're at 324 automations. That's over 4200 tasks executed every day. From a scale and monitoring perspective, we know which bots are running, which ones may be going slow, and which didn't run. The ability of the control with room to monitor allows us to jump in and help out when necessary. That is paramount to our success. 

Automation Anywhere helps us find value. We do use professional services from time to time to augment both our capacity and capabilities while finding new ways of doing things. This is a very fast-moving environment. The things that we did five years ago are gone. We threw them away. We upgraded to new versions and have new capabilities. Keeping up with the latest and greatest is always a challenge. There are also new ways of development and sharing those findings, whether it's a webcast or part of the Pathfinder program; we're always curious about what's next with the product.

The tools are fundamentally solid. However, when I think of self-healing, such as automation with a new prompt or a new Windows patch occurring, being able to handle those kinds of things on top of what Automation Anywhere already does and that automatically click through and do the reboots that are necessary to just have a clean run would be ideal. That way, no one has to wake up in the middle of the night and adjust something. That would be amazing. 

Our company has been using Automation Anywhere for seven years. I've been using Automation Anywhere since 2017.

From a stability perspective, whether it's servers or virtual desktops with agents, we have very few issues. We have multiple servers and have never experienced downtime. We have had one or two nodes go down based on hardware issues, however, it's resilient. 

We're now at 324 automations, and it definitely scales. The screens prioritize things, and you have dashboards that say what's working and what isn't. Those types of activities help drive us to where the problems are and show us what we need to resolve them.

Technical support is solid. We pick up the phone and call and create tickets. We get responses almost instantly. We've had many nights trying to figure out how things work on our network or looking at logs. They've been great about jumping in any time we've asked for help. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

Throughout the history of development, people have tried to automate things. We've never used a tool that had the control room and the features, the scheduling, and the complexity that it could handle. When Automation Anywhere packaged the whole bundle together, that was the differentiator that really drove us to it.

When we think of ETL, all the standard tools, whether it's SQL or Oracle, we still have all those. However, for speed and simplicity and getting things to production fast, we'll leverage Automation Anywhere.

Many other options often require a data expert. You have to go to database tables to do automation or ETL-type activities, and you have to schedule that and know if there are conflicts within other systems. Plus, if there's downtime, you may not be able to run pieces. It's true coding. There is testing that's also required and the delivery time is not measured in weeks. It's measured in months. We'd all like everything to integrate seamlessly. That said, the real world comes into play, and I'm glad we have Automation Anywhere to fill everything out. 

Setup for us was probably the longest lead time. We're a bank, so we always have to scan the code base. We want to jump in, understand the connectivity, and understand how things are going to happen. There are a lot of planning-type activities before the install. We started in 2017 with version seven of Automation Anywhere. We went through version ten, then moved on to the A360. Each experience became better and better.

We have a PCI-compliant installation as well as our normal normal network.

Our experience deploying Automation Anywhere was seamless. From a server perspective, we run about a dozen servers in four dev IT QB production environments. We'll continue to do the first servers in dev and move to migrate them all the way through production. For any issues that we have along the way, customer service is right there with us to troubleshoot.

We've seen an ROI via hard saves. We define a hard save as someone having to leave the bank or a contract has to leave. We are net positive in our spend. We've managed to prioritize the highest use cases from a cost-saving perspective.

We find it comparable to other products out there. I wouldn't say huge differentiators from that perspective. 

We looked at autoIT to look at for specialty use cases. 

The very first bot that was rolled out was on my team. I've been able to see the control room and the code in progress and evolve over the years has been a pleasure. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

From an RPA perspective, it has all the core functionality. We can automate the bank's systems. The reliability, performance monitoring, and development time are excellent. In 2017, it used to take us six to nine months to develop. That was slow. Fast-forward to 2024, and it takes six weeks, plus or minus two weeks depending on complexity, to deliver an automation. 

Automation Anywhere Co-pilot functions similarly to BPM because one user forms and triggers the bot, which works in the background, then shows a message to other departments for approval. It is very predictable and used in many companies. However, in Pakistan, many departments use BPM instead of Automation Anywhere Co-pilot, so they are not utilizing Automation Anywhere Co-pilot.

I am an expert in Automation Anywhere because I develop automation scripts and use IQ Bot for design workflow and process design. Automation Anywhere is very comfortable for any developer to use RPA tools.

Automation Anywhere has citizen developer capabilities. When we develop a bot, the RPA is low-code, no-code development, making it very easy for business developers to use.

AARI is a bot tool that is easy to develop. As an Automation Anywhere Co-pilot developer, I can say that it basically integrates many bots in one platform. It is used by business developers to connect different departments, making it very accessible to automate processes.

Automation Anywhere is not difficult to upgrade because we have bot scripts. When we upgrade, the bot scripts remain unchanged, so there is no difficulty.

Automation Anywhere is very scalable when used on-premises rather than in the cloud. It is used in banking environments, and many large banks across different countries use Automation Anywhere, which demonstrates its scalability.

Automation Anywhere's scale level involves a discovery bot. We use their bots, allowing us to easily scale our bots and maintain proper logging.

Before Automation Anywhere, I worked on Power Automate, but since it is a cloud platform, it was not suitable for banking systems in Pakistan as they do not use cloud computing.

As an RPA consultant who has purchased many licenses and evaluated numerous tools, I recommend Automation Anywhere because it integrates easily with AI and Power BI tools for reporting and discovery bot capabilities, allowing proper log control.

Automation Anywhere uses rule-based access where only admins and developers can access the code. Citizen developers or business users cannot see the code due to rule-based access.

They offer unique features such as hybrid bot capability, which supports both attended and unattended bots on one platform, setting it apart from other tools.

For rule-based tools, I recommend RPA. For unstructured data and predictions, AI is more suitable. For chatbots and different models, Gen AI is appropriate. As an RPA developer, I work with three modes: OCR for AI integration, and chatbot integration, such as Watson in IBM RPA for Gen AI applications.

I automate data entry by receiving files from one system and making data entries into other applications. Additionally, I perform file transfers by receiving files from one system and uploading them to another application. I also have OFAC verification procedures, which were previously done manually. I enter a local application, and depending on the pending cases, execute all verification processes automatically, sending responses to other applications. Basically, I have extensive data transfer automation. Moreover, I have automation that receives a file from another system and executes a procedure or invokes a web service to upload or create other things.

The product, in general, is more stable. The latest version provides easier vulnerability management. The new version offers a better experience in recognizing objects. The Co-manager tool helps calculate saving costs. Many of the issues I had in version eleven were resolved in version 360. The cloud version of Automation Anywhere 360 eliminates all the vulnerability management, making it much easier to manage. The application replaced about three employees for the OFAC verification processes, thus eliminating the need to hire more people for those tasks.

The new version requires one project to be open at a time, making it slightly more difficult to manage tasks compared to the previous version. They sell every different functionality in too many separate packages, making the procurement process complicated as it requires paying additional licensing for more features.

I have been using the solution for about six years.

The support is good. Sometimes the technical team doesn't know too much about the situation, and they rely on knowledge articles. However, they have improved.

Neutral

This is my first RPA solution. I have other automation solutions in my company, but this was my first RPA solution.

The initial setup for the initial version, version eleven, is not too complex, medium. The latest version is easier because it requires less infrastructure.

One person was involved in the deployment.

The bot replaced about three employees, saving hiring costs.

I think it is expensive. It is not a cheap solution. Though there are other options that possibly can be less expensive, this is not a cheap solution. It's not for everybody.

My supervisor conducted research based on the Gartner reviews and decided to go for Automation Anywhere. This analysis was made several years ago.

The overall rating of Automation Anywhere is eight on a scale of one to ten. Other departments in my company use Control-M and Ansible for automation. If I did not have Automation Anywhere, we might have needed to hire more people for certain processes. I don't have any direct integrations, but I do have several project integrations via file or triggering a bot when an email is received.