Automation Anywhere Reviews

We have use cases for Automation Anywhere in underwriting claims, HR, IT support, and various other areas. It's mixed. 

We completed our first document automation POC this year with Automation Anywhere. We don't really use it extensively yet. The use case we were trying to use it for did not work that effectively, however, that is probably more of a use case identification and selection issue. 

We were trying to apply Automation Anywhere to a catch-all contract-reading program. There were no good requirements, and we simply wondered if it could read the contract. While it could read contracts, we didn't have good planning for what to do with the information once we created it. We didn't have the human loop elements set up for exception handling at that time, which made it challenging.

Automation Anywhere has benefited our company as we've been able to process thousands of transactions daily through various automations that distribute work, classify work, and handle claims, doing preliminary work for the finance team. When an adjuster first sees it, they don't have to access multiple systems to gather information because the automation has already completed that task. It has been really useful for traditional RPA, which remains our forte.

What I appreciate most about Automation Anywhere is how easy it is to use and test, particularly the debug feature. I've been doing considerable development this year. It has been easy to put together looping and if logic. 

Automation Anywhere could be improved by staying more current with Microsoft products through packages. There have been challenges with their email package. For a long time, they didn't have an effective one, and with new Outlook releases changing how Microsoft handles emails, the package hasn't been updated to accommodate these changes. It still uses old, deprecated Microsoft components that have an end date. 

There have also been struggles with other Microsoft suite applications, such as SharePoint. They moved from their old REST to a graph API, and the packages aren't configured to accommodate that out of the box, requiring the use of generic API commands instead of the out-of-box packages.

I have been using Automation Anywhere in the company for six years.

Automation Anywhere helps overcome challenges with decent sales representatives who make calls on a cadence, and we can set up meetings easily. They provided technical architecture consulting for a few hours with some of our leaders.

I didn't use another solution before choosing Automation Anywhere. Currently, we are also using Microsoft Power Automate extensively.

The deployment was fine. We had to get some servers set up to deploy some service accounts created to have the bot runner licenses and set up some users in the control room. It really wasn't that complicated.

For what we have in the traditional RPA space with Automation Anywhere, the pricing is good. The licensing hasn't caused any concerns. I'm not familiar with the pricing of the agentic features as we don't have them yet. For the traditional functionality, it has been feasible.

We considered UiPath six years ago before choosing Automation Anywhere. I didn't personally evaluate UiPath as that was before my involvement. Automation Anywhere is more robust and functions more as a platform for integration, embedding, and orchestration. Power Automate is faster to set up and cheaper for our current uses. It doesn't necessarily work better with Microsoft products than Automation Anywhere does.

The main challenge we were trying to solve when implementing Automation Anywhere was entering the emerging space six years ago. Currently, we're determining our path forward with agent process automation and AI. We have an AI council and are still determining where it fits into that picture.

In the age of agentic AI, our company's biggest challenges include getting buy-in and understanding across the organization. All decision-makers and stakeholders need to understand what's possible, what competitors are doing, and how the industry landscape is changing. There aren't necessarily challenges with the software itself. It requires funding and getting people who make decisions to see the vision.

We don't have the AI Agent Studio feature of Automation Anywhere. AI governance is extremely important in our company and has been somewhat of a blocker. We've been working to form a council and determine how our company will use AI, which remains an ongoing process.

We don't have AARI for autopilot capability and have never utilized Automation Anywhere COE, Center of Excellence. We are deploying Automation Anywhere to the cloud. We aren't using API with Automation Anywhere yet, mostly focusing on RPA, though we're considering API usage.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten overall.

I am trying to solve data challenges with Automation Anywhere. Not all data is good quality. This presents a challenge for automation, which is important.

Automation Anywhere has impacted our efficiency and productivity in a very positive way since we are shutting down a very manual process. 

Automation Anywhere has helped my company with APIs. We are currently in a project to create APIs for our core banking service and other transactional systems, migrating from another integration technology to API. We have measured the time saved by using document automation with Automation Anywhere, and it amounts to about five hours.

We have used the APA. It's helped us achieve some automation. We're working on a project now, which requires us to make APIs, and we're using this for that work.

We use the document automation capabilities. We can optimize about three or four people who previously performed the tasks manually. This is just the beginning of the impact we see, however, it's a significant impact for us. We've saved about 500 hours so far.

I am unsure how Automation Anywhere can be improved.

Integration with other platforms may prove to be very interesting for us and others.

I started using Automation Anywhere last year. We are currently in the setup phase for our solution and need to move to production. It's very recent, as we discovered it at the end of last year.

Before Automation Anywhere, we were testing other solutions including Microsoft and Oracle, and currently we are testing Data Stimulus.

The deployment is ongoing. It's not difficult. You have all of the information you need to implement successfully. 

The pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Automation Anywhere are good. It's more of a challenge for us to get all the value that the platform can provide. It's not very costly; it's a fair price.

The main differences between Automation Anywhere and other tools are in their focus. For example, we need many partners to make good things happen with other tools, but with Automation Anywhere, it works very well.

In the age of agentic AI, the biggest challenges for me and my company come from people not being open to this technology. In financial services and traditional banks, people are very cautious. They need extensive testing and need to see the technology working to understand its advantages. AI governance is very important to me and my company as many areas are inquiring about AI. Without governance, we would be in chaos.

The AI in the studio and the integration from all the AI and other platforms is very interesting, and it's a very good opportunity for us now. 

We do not use the COE just yet.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate the solution a nine. I don't know all of the solutions. I only really know Automation Anywhere, and so it's hard to compare it against all others. 

We are still in the relative infancy with Automation Anywhere. We still use mostly RPA bots and haven't quite gotten to the Agentic Process yet. We are hoping to upgrade our platform to the Enterprise platform this year, so we are still at the beginning of the learning curve in the RPA bot-building stages. We have a couple of Co-Pilot projects going on currently, but we are still trying to get the process owners to buy in.

The main challenge we are looking to solve with Agentic Process automation involves processes that work specifically with call center operations. This includes agents taking calls, managing cases, working with ServiceNow, ticket handling, and similar tasks. Agentic Process automation shines when people create cases and tickets flow in and out of the system, but a human isn't needed to process most of that because it is all being captured by the computer during intake. Saving time working on the phone, gathering information, and handling ticket information makes APA a huge game-changer.

In the age of Agentic AI, the biggest challenges for me and my company involve adoption. We are still in the infancy of process automation, so currently, it is just getting the stakeholders to buy in. Automation Anywhere has helped me with that. Our company has looked at different software vendors, and Automation Anywhere is worlds apart from any other offering. The platform itself is intuitive and easy to use. I have even mentioned to people who aren't developers or very computer savvy that they could pick up Automation Anywhere and just get started.

I have really loved all of the new Agentic Process automation pieces from Automation Anywhere that are being introduced. They are announcing new features at AA Imagine, and it has been fantastic to see all of the amazing innovations. I am really hoping we can get to that Enterprise platform this year so we can take advantage of the APA capabilities, as there is groundbreaking, industry-changing technology happening.

It is difficult for me to suggest improvements for Automation Anywhere because it is such a fantastic product. We have looked at competitors, and there is nobody that holds a candle to Automation Anywhere.

It is challenging to specify needed improvements because there is so much functionality we are not taking advantage of yet. We haven't been able to utilize the full product offerings, which makes it difficult to suggest specific improvements.

One of the things that has gone very well is the control room itself. The control room itself is easy to use. One area that could potentially be improved is adding additional widget capability within the main dashboard in the control room itself.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for about eight years.

It's been great. It's been flawless. We've had great integrations into Genesys and ServiceNow. Deployment has been wonderful.

It is fantastic. It has been great. It is perfectly priced for the quality received. When paying for quality, that is exactly what you get.

We considered UiPath and Blue Prism before choosing Automation Anywhere. ServiceNow has an RPA platform, but it was not suitable for our needs. The main competitors we looked at were UiPath and Blue Prism, but Automation Anywhere was exactly what we were looking for.

I believe Automation Anywhere could help achieve our automation goals, but we haven't reached the APA stage yet, as we are still in the RPA stage. There are numerous use cases we could implement.

AI governance is important for my company in general. Having governance in place ensures things work out properly and stay aligned. However, that part is managed by our product manager. 

We have several copilot projects in development, but we are not using Automation 360 AI yet. We don't use Automation Anywhere COE yet, which is another offering we hope to invest in this year. I am not utilizing document automation in current processes, which is another capability we hope to get buy-in for this year.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten.

Get manual tasks done by automations wherever possible. For now, we only use task bots. We use them across whole EMEA at RICOH for different departments like: Business Services, SCM, Annuity & Services, Data governance, Finance and Sales. When I joined Ricoh, there were 30 processes in production and now we scaled up over 50 processes in production and counting.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, we wanted to get rid of the mundane tasks. They are better to be carried out by bots so that the employees can focus on tasks that need human decisions, not repetitive tasks. We also wanted better customer satisfaction.

We also have an email automation where people can write emails to us 24/7, and we create service requests inside Siebel. It is an Oracle app. 

With all process in production so far, we reduced the manual effort which led to more satisfaction by employees to get rid of the mundane tasks and focus more on tasks which need human decisions. Especially for our Annuity & Services department we have a quicker response time, and this led to more customer satisfaction.

Automation Anywhere constantly bringing new features in their product. Which will open more possibilities for automation out of the box.

The integration of coding languages like Python, JavaScript an VB Script will allow to extend the capabilities.

The bot store is also a good point to explore pre-built automation to integrate in your tasks.

To keep yourself up to date they provide Skill Booster learning trails for the new features and product updates.

The website has a lot to provide, but with this whole variety of information it is hard for me to keep track and navigate through.

AI agents need constant improvement, but this is by the nature of AI.

We had a use case for handwritten documents, which we were not able to extract safely, so some improvements on document automation would be great.

I am using Automation Anywhere as a developer since September 2021, so for almost 4 years now.

It is stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.

I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability because we can use the workload management feature.

We have approximately 20 people using this solution.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

Prior to Automation Anywhere, we were doing almost everything manually. We started with Automation Anywhere version 11 and later migrated to A360.

We have a separate team that handles the integration and setup. We are still on the on-premises version of Automation Anywhere. We are not using the cloud version. We have virtual machines running for us developers. We have a development environment where we use our own dedicated VMs. We develop automation on these VMs, and then we push it through the UAT and the last life cycle for production.

As far as I have heard from our team, they said it was easy to implement.

We started with version 11 of Automation Anywhere back in 2019. When I joined the team in 2022, we were migrating from version 11 to A360. I directly started in the migration phase where I could help with my fresh knowledge, because I was one of the first ones certified in A360.

Our central RPA team, which handles resources, currently consists of five people. I am not sure how many people from the service provider are involved, as they handle on-prem resources. On our side, we have five people pushing these things to production. As a developer, not much maintenance is required.

I am not involved in the pricing, but based on what I hear from our central RPA team, it is not very expensive; it is also not cheap. Its price is in the midrange.

We are not using the AI tools from Automation Anywhere, but we have created some of our own modules, which we are triggering in combination with Automation Anywhere in Python scripting language. We are using this combination for text analysis and problem descriptions from our customers. We are getting the sentiment score to categorize these service requests so that our agents can handle them better. We will, for sure, investigate if we can use Automation Anywhere's AI capabilities in the future.

I am responsible for showing and teaching new joiners how to work with Automation Anywhere. We also have some new citizen developers. We have asked different departments if they have some people on their team who are interested in this. They are not professional developers like me, but I teach them the basics. I also recommend they join the citizen developer training provided by the Automation Anywhere University. They take that training first, and then we do in-depth training tailored to the RICOH processes. It takes them three to six months, but it also depends on how much time they can spend on the training because they also have their regular work.

If you start using Automation Anywhere I highly recommend the Automation Anywhere University platform to start with the learning trails.

These are focused on three roles: Automation Lead, Automation Developer and Citizen Developer.

Also, great content on the Skill Boosters which will give you in depth training on a particular topic.

To scale your automation journey, good practice is building central tasks like “switching a responsibility” in Oracle with proper error handling that not every developer needs to implement these by his own. With these generic central tasks, it will also save time in terms of maintenance.

For any questions you might have, you can ask them in the Pathfinder Community where you get answers from Automation Anywhere’s global community of Pathfinders.

For companies starting new process automation implementation, I would advise not to tackle the largest processes at the beginning. Start with small ones to track benefits and demonstrate to the board what process automation has achieved in a short time. In the past, we tackled larger problems first and spent one or two years getting them to work end to end as expected. This was not the best strategy.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

My usual use cases for this solution are banking use cases, including fraud detection, KYC, loan, and loan servicing use cases.

The features and capabilities of Automation Anywhere that I have found most valuable include excellent support. As enterprise customers, we benefit from strong support for our needs.

My experience with the technical support of Automation Anywhere is great. Whatever issues we encounter are resolved within the defined TAT and SLAs, and their technical expertise ensures quick response times.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use for business users who do not have technical skills. We have citizen developers, and there are features available for non-technical or business users to create bots and automate their use cases.

The learning curve for Automation Anywhere is good, particularly with Agent AI. We have completed all our deployments using Agent AI with different GenAI features, and the experience has been excellent.

Currently, Agent AI is the best feature of Automation Anywhere. I value the Agent AI feature because previously all automation was achieved through RPA. Now, with AI advancement, we have RPA plus Agent use cases where Agent AI handles everything without human intervention in the loop.

The positive impact and benefits I have experienced from using Automation Anywhere include ROI through FTE reduction on the business side, which depends on the specific use case. We have benefited significantly from converting our manual efforts into automation and reducing our FTEs.

Automation Anywhere could benefit from more in-person support, as they currently maintain only a virtual presence. I would value this improvement because it provides real connection and facilitates better understanding of use cases and expectations.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for the last five to seven years.

I rate the stability and reliability of Automation Anywhere as nine since we do not experience any major application downtimes.

I rate the scalability of Automation Anywhere as nine because over the five to seven years I have been using it, I have observed that it has already scaled well and will continue to be scalable in the future.

My experience with the technical support of Automation Anywhere is great. Whatever issues we encounter are resolved within the defined TAT and SLAs, and with their technical expertise, the response time is quick and effective.

I rate the technical support as eight.

Positive

Before Automation Anywhere, I was using Automation Edge and UiPath. I decided to switch from UiPath because of cost considerations, and with Automation Edge, we did not have sufficient technical support from that team.

The initial setup and deployment of Automation Anywhere were straightforward, with no major challenges during the setup process.

I participated in the initial deployment and setup of Automation Anywhere, including regular deployments and upgrades.

Automation Anywhere has helped me save both time and costs, with savings of approximately eight million in the last two to three years.

In terms of percentage, I saved around thirty to forty percent of time compared to before using Automation Anywhere.

The pricing of Automation Anywhere is reasonable compared to other RPA tools and agentic tools, and they stand out well in the market.

Before choosing Automation Anywhere, I evaluated Microsoft Power Automate, but it was not suitable for our use cases, which is why we selected Automation Anywhere.

I do not integrate other tools or applications with Automation Anywhere.

I do not use Automation CoPilot in Automation Anywhere as I use it in the office.

I was addressing challenges related to implementing Agent AI and its components, which we are now able to deploy successfully.

Training non-technical employees on Automation Anywhere usage does not present major obstacles, as we have technical expertise available on premises, and for any technical challenges, we leverage their solution architect experience.

From my organization's perspective on automation and AI, we have already deployed the use cases we wanted and need to explore additional features that become available in AI.

My approach regarding generative AI is specific to generative AI and CoPilot. We need to evaluate these features because we have not yet explored those areas, but we plan to do so in our future roadmap.

I rate Automation Anywhere overall as eight.

Our primary use cases for Automation Anywhere focus around accounting and finance. We have some that have moved into our land department focusing mainly on lease records.

The benefit has been in terms of the bot taking a job that someone was doing and being able to move that person into another position. We have also seen a department with ten people being able to do the same work with two people. We were able to move those other people to more value-added tasks.

The valuable features of Automation Anywhere really are around the ease of use. Our RPA program focuses on citizen development, and all of the developers have full-time jobs as accountants, and then they work in automation on the side when time allows. 

The benefits of using Automation Anywhere focus on error reduction and moving people to work on more high-value tasks. We haven't focused so much on eliminating positions, but actually moving people to more valuable tasks. It helps to take away things that normally take a lot of time for someone to do, but don't add a lot of value to their job.

I really appreciate the user interface of Automation Anywhere, but I would like to see some improvement on some of the automation around screen processing. This includes adding some artificial intelligence on the way that bots actually can read the screen and know when things change and be able to adapt to those changes.

I've been using Automation Anywhere for around six years.

Automation Anywhere has been very stable for us. Control rooms are up, and we haven't had any issues or major issues where we had significant downtime.

Automation Anywhere scales very easily as we grow with our program. We're able to add bot runners as needed, as well as control rooms. It's very easy to add additional resources for the program.

Automation Anywhere support has been very good. We're able to put in tickets and request support, and we'll have a support engineer contact us and help us resolve our issues. 

I would give them a nine out of ten. The initial contact might often be a chatbot, which would be our initial response. However, many times, we need to talk to a real engineer to resolve our issues. Overall, it's been very good. Sometimes the chatbot can help you resolve your issues without having to further escalate.

Before Automation Anywhere, we did not have any kind of automated solution. Our audit partner came back and said that we should be doing some automation using an RPA product. At that point, my boss asked me to figure out which was the correct product for us to use, and we started our journey there.

During our deployment of Automation Anywhere, the first and most important thing that we did was to make sure that we got everyone trained. We spent a lot of upfront time training our developers, and that really paid off in the long term. We ran them all through Automation Anywhere's university, so they did all the online training, and then we brought Automation Anywhere in and did classroom training for our developers. That really paid off in dividends, and we were able to end up with a good developer base.

When we started with Automation Anywhere, we were on-prem with version eleven, and then we migrated to the cloud with A360. We saw a tremendous increase in productivity by going to the cloud. We currently aren't using any other cloud providers.

We primarily focus on natural gas production in Pennsylvania. Our office is located in Fort Worth, Texas. We have around 57 automations in production at this point.

The pricing that we received from Automation Anywhere in the beginning was very economical for us. We've seen a lot of benefit from what we spent to what we're receiving. From the beginning, it's been a very low-cost implementation for us.

When we started our journey with Automation Anywhere, we evaluated UiPath, Pega, and Automation Anywhere. We brought all three in to do a proof of concept, and from that, we determined that Automation Anywhere would be the easiest to use for our citizen developers. After the Automation Anywhere proof of concept, one of our accountants went back to her desk, and she was able to create a bot on her own.

My advice to other companies that are looking to purchase Automation Anywhere would be to make sure you have a champion for your process automation program so that you can get support throughout the organization. Automation Anywhere will be a trusted partner to help you through that process. 

I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten. As a solution for process automation, it's been very easy for us to use, and I don't think that we could have done it with any other solution.

The company called me to work on the goal of restructuring the team and putting everything in order. When I joined this team, I needed to assess the current state of the program, and I essentially had to reorganize the entire program. Fortunately, that's what I've been doing right now; I have experience managing Automation Anywhere, and it's a great tool for automation since it gives you a lot of flexibility to work with different applications.

From my perspective, the most valuable features in Automation Anywhere are the ability to connect to different systems of records. We are using it at a very basic level; we only use RPA and are not using Intelligent Automation or AI yet; it's not part of my contract. Document Automation is still growing and is not, from my perspective, 100% mature, yet the basic functionality of RPA is amazing. I really appreciate how you can connect and interact, regardless of the system of record, infrastructure, or platform, and that has given us a lot of power to help the organization interact and eventually automate their processes.

In terms of reducing manual work, I think Automation Anywhere could improve by incorporating better integration with DevOps. This is functionality; it's a methodology that cannot be integrated 100% with Automation Anywhere, and a lot of companies are requiring that right now. I think Automation Anywhere is in the right direction, however, a better task mining tool would be great. What we currently have with Fortress IQ needs to mature more, and I say this since people spend weeks creating PDDs documentation. If we had a user-friendly tool that could record sessions and generate PDDs in minutes, it would greatly assist our processes. I have seen tools similar to that, not with Automation Anywhere. It would be great to have it.

I started using the RPA Automation Anywhere in 2017, starting with zero automations. After seven years, we've ended up having around 120-some automations.

My assessment of the stability and reliability of Automation Anywhere or its bots depends on how you define your development strategies. If you have good best practices, reusable code, an effective framework, and a solid development methodology, bots can be very stable. We do have some bots that fail, however, they generally fail since we weren't good developers or due to a glitch in the system, not due to the fact that Automation Anywhere failed. We see issues. That said, those are often related to server maintenance and upgrades.

In terms of how Automation Anywhere scales with the growing needs of my organization, in the cloud, I don't see much problem; the cloud will scale based on our needs. The only concern I see is probably on the Bot Runner side; I need to support VMs, and my team is working to migrate those VMs to servers. This change will help me scale since I can have multiple Bot Runners on a single server rather than adding more VMs; increasing the power of the server allows for 20 to 30 Bot Runners to operate effectively.

We migrated to gold support last year, which is excellent. What I appreciate is that you have a technology partner who gets to know your environment, and that's very important. When I began at my previous company without gold or platinum support, I had to explain my environment every time there was an issue, wasting hours. Now that we are in gold support, they already understand our setup, infrastructure, and pain points, allowing us to address issues more efficiently.

Prior to adopting Automation Anywhere, my company used Excel macros, which are not an enterprise solution; they are more a personal automation tool. Some people were using Power Automate, still, that's not an enterprise solution; you cannot integrate it with the rest of the tools; it's just a Microsoft tool where you can only work with Microsoft products.

The primary drivers that led my company to choose an RPA tool and eventually Automation Anywhere are its capabilities to connect and integrate with other systems of records, not only with specific brands like Microsoft. When I started in 2017, we decided to use Automation Anywhere primarily for its ability to interact with various systems and it was regarded as an enterprise solution.

I have seen a lot of benefits using Automation Anywhere. We currently have around 50 automations running in production, and I am confident that we are saving several million dollars as a result. I cannot provide those numbers right now. Still, I can see many benefits emerging. We work very closely with the legal team, who have to do a lot of manual work; we basically help a lot. That's my main customer right now. The next important customer is technology and digital technology, and then finance. So from all those three teams, I'm covering probably 80% of the company. As a financial institution focusing mainly on financial advice, we will be opening a completely digital bank in the next few days.

I am aware of the existence of other tools, however, I have not evaluated them. When I started in my previous company, there was a prior agreement for me to use Automation Anywhere. When I joined this company, they were already using it; my understanding is they were at some point evaluating UiPath, however, the cost was a huge decision-maker.

I work in the banking industry as the Intelligent Automation Manager for engineering. I joined this company almost a year ago, and I worked before that for one of the largest banks in the US.

My advice would be to ensure proper planning before adopting Automation Anywhere. First, you must define your environment, focusing on security and compliance. Governance is key, and once you are set up, ensure you are developing proper metrics since you need to show management the savings generated from automations. Once you've established that, implement best practices and standards, create a framework, and I wish anyone good luck; they likely will be successful.

I would rate Automation Anywhere as an eight out of ten. It's a great solution, however, there are limitations with tools COE Manager and Document Automation. I have seen some restrictions in the system, and making improvements to tools Fortress IQ would enhance our experience. I understand Automation Anywhere's operational goals, however, maturing these tools would make it an even better solution from my perspective.

Something I have observed repeatedly, as a technical person who engages with various attendees at Imagine events, is the need for clarity when new solutions arise. AI is excellent. That said, my question is about data storage; will data be kept within our control? This topic is crucial for compliance and legal approvals. I think it would be beneficial to have more technical sessions demonstrating how new tools are implemented. For example, during a discussion on Document Automation at a conference, I was concerned about how data moves from on-premises to the cloud, as it could take us out of compliance. More information on these aspects would help people understand the implications.

We have had a number of different use cases for Automation Anywhere. As a higher education institution, many of the use cases have been for back office operations. 

Some use cases include automating expense reimbursement processes. This involves the submission of data after collection, validation of data, and several different steps in that process. 

We are exploring invoice reconciliation and invoice processing as a new use case. Many of the other use cases have been system-to-system data transfer where they don't have APIs, which has been accomplished through UI automation and RPA.

We chose Automation Anywhere to investigate the feasibility of using RPA in place of dedicating other team's time for developing custom APIs between systems. We wanted to tackle problems that we couldn't dedicate resources to solving with custom in-house development and bridge the gap between third-party external software.

The governance guardrails built into the Automation Anywhere platform have allowed us to develop solutions at a pace while adhering to our internal organizational policies.

The scalability of Automation Anywhere, the framework, and user interface are particularly impressive. When evaluating Automation Anywhere versus alternatives such as UiPath for RPA specifically, their tool works exceptionally well. Their customer support model has been fantastic at resolving issues. Security and infrastructure are other significant components why we continue to use them. 

The actual tools on the RPA side have been very nice to work with. When onboarding members of our team, being a lower-code platform with much of it being no code, it has been good to bring people up to speed. It's easy to bring both people from developer and non-developer backgrounds up to scale. Our developers have applied standard SDLC principles towards working within that platform.

With agentic process automation, there are several challenges we were looking to solve. GenAI infused document automation has been of great interest to us, especially in invoice processing for our financial side. With APA in particular, some use cases involve taking complex processes that could have large decision trees, and instead of dedicating time and resources towards fleshing out all those if/then statements or pushing exceptions to human middle processing, we aim to lower that scope and allow for quicker delivery time.

The Composer orchestration tools have been great in developing new solutions. Automation Anywhere started as a pilot at our CMU, where we are at the forefront of numerous computer science areas. It's part of our CTO's mission to embrace automation tools, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation, bringing internal processes into the 21st century and beyond.

Automation Anywhere helps us overcome challenges in the age of GenAI. The platform has solved our initial challenges as we transition from being a pilot to a long-term customer. With GenAI, challenges revolve around use case identification and implementing AI in processes while ensuring governance and protecting sensitive information, government information, and student information.

AI governance and data protection are extremely important for our company. We are currently reviewing the Autopilot capability and evaluating document automation with AI capabilities for new solutions.

As we expand our components of the Automation Anywhere platform that we utilize, we need better connections between them. Currently, our shell framework, metrics, logging, and guardrails are done at an RPA or Bot level. As we take advantage of other features such as work queues, process Composer, and AI agents, we would prefer to see features around offering frameworks around those models or domains specifically that can encompass all of the subset features that Automation Anywhere offers.

Bot Insight is an available feature, and we can create our own custom metrics and logging in RPA Bots, but we don't want to have to send results to a logging subset bot after using an AI agent or higher components such as document automation. We need a native way in Automation Anywhere's framework to tie all that information together, including AI dashboard, governance dashboards, and document automation results.

We have been using Automation Anywhere for about two and a half to three and a half years.

Their customer support model has been fantastic at resolving issues.

Positive

In the RPA space specifically, we have not used any other solution that addresses similar needs before using Automation Anywhere. 

For internal technologies prior to implementing RPA, we had various solutions. For table-based and database-based operations, users were using spreadsheets. 

We are now able to convert certain things to databases, even without native APIs for certain software platforms, because we can leverage Automation Anywhere to bridge the gap between disconnected systems. In the specific landscape that Automation Anywhere competes in, we haven't used direct competitors. 

We have been replacing software developer adjacent technologies, custom script solutions, and low code/no code platforms with different features from Automation Anywhere.

Standing up the service itself had no significant challenges. There were a few small challenges, however, nothing significant that were nonstarters for us. Our teams were able to work around any issues. The biggest thing we had was was enabling SAML authentication to work with our identity management services. 

Other than that, standing up the service, connecting the host controller to our local VMs, etc., that was easy. There was a little bit of network stuff, and some of DevOps stuff. Thankfully, we have a great DevOps team. Working with Automation Anywhere is largely straightforward and seamless.

We have been happy with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Automation Anywhere so far. There is sticker shock with many new features, however, we definitely think that the end results can more than justify the cost. We are evaluating the use case and the resources needed to stand up solutions using some of these features. 

The cost versus return for the traditional out-of-the-box features has been very reasonable.

Since the evaluation phase, we have not considered other solutions that do the same as Automation Anywhere. We have been extremely happy with Automation Anywhere. The tools provided for the cost, scalability, robustness, and infrastructure have been very satisfactory, and we have not had a significant need to evaluate alternative platforms. 

This may not stay that way forever as this is an ever-changing landscape, but for the foreseeable future, we don't see ourselves evaluating alternative platforms.

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