Automation Anywhere Reviews

I usually use Automation Anywhere in automating most of my work; for example, entering data, processing invoices, and generating reports automatically.

What I appreciate most about Automation Anywhere is that it really saves time and reduces a lot of errors, which would have happened if we had to use manual work; so it has that aspect of time saving and reducing errors that are usually made when doing that work manually.

Some of the things I have not appreciated about Automation Anywhere is that when I was setting it up at the beginning, it was a bit complex and it required some technical knowledge for me to set it up; however, there was documentation about its use that helped me in setting it up, but mostly the setup is a bit complex.

Regarding the pricing of Automation Anywhere, it is not bad, but it is a bit complex if we consider an organization with a limited number of people or a small-sized organization; its pricing is not usually fit for such organizations. However, for large companies or large organizations, the pricing is a bit acceptable for them.

The initial setup of Automation Anywhere is complex, and it has many components which I need to first install, such as the Control Room, the Bot Creator, and the Bot Runner; it also has many user roles and permissions that I had to first configure, along with the bot deployment settings and various other things.

Automation Anywhere requires maintenance on my end, so I cannot just set it up and leave it; I need to maintain it after some time, for example, with UI changes and software updates, and I think that is the maintenance it usually needs.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for about two years.

Regarding stability, Automation Anywhere is fairly stable because bots rarely crash and errors are always minimal; so if handled very well, it is actually very stable.

Automation Anywhere is highly scalable, allowing us to easily add more bots as our organization grows, and we can manage them centrally as the needs of our organization continue to grow; it also enables that feature that helps us add more bots as the organization needs continue to grow.

I have contacted technical support and they were very responsive.

The technical support team is very responsive and supportive; they helped me, but one problem I encountered is that sometimes their resolution takes a longer time, but eventually, they end up sorting the issue that is always addressed to them.

I have used something similar to Automation Anywhere, but I found Automation Anywhere to stand out as the most convenient and most friendly to me; that is why I prefer using it now because I could not compare it with other things I had used before.

The initial setup of Automation Anywhere is complex, and it has many components which I need to first install, such as the Control Room, the Bot Creator, and the Bot Runner; it also has many user roles and permissions that I had to first configure, along with the bot deployment settings and various other things.

The Automation Co-pilot, AARI, is very friendly because I can easily use it to trigger my bots from my desktop without needing a lot of technical knowledge; so it is very friendly to me.

It usually takes about three days to train non-technical users on how to use Automation Anywhere when we are doing it on a daily basis; about three days are enough.

I would rate this review a 9 overall.

Through Automation Anywhere RPA, we have been able to save thousands of hours of AP invoice processing each year.

Automation Anywhere RPA has enabled a lot of our employees to have their valuable time freed up to do other things, ranging from the Treasury department, the Revenue department, General and Cost Accounting. We had lots of manual processes, no automation whatsoever, and the automations are able to automate those things, such as document processing, PDFs, and ERP system navigation, enabling our employees to focus on other things that require more critical thinking and decision making.

As far as what could be improved with Automation Anywhere, I think they have a really wonderful product. There have been things in the past that I have asked them to improve or submitted a ticket to them to improve, and I've seen results from that. 

They have implemented something that makes the product better. 

If there was anything that I would ask for improvement on, there were times in the past where through submitting a ticket for support, it seemed that some of the engineers who were helping me did not understand the product that they were supporting. That felt difficult because I felt I was almost explaining the product to the company. But again, isolated and for the most part, it's been a really good experience.

Before we implemented Automation Anywhere, we were not using any automation or RPA solution back in 2018.

Their support team is really great, and they also have a really robust online community, the Pathfinder Community, where developers and automation leaders can go and have discussions, submit use cases or issues, and get support from others as well. I have also had Automation Anywhere staff respond and reach out to me through a Pathfinder community post that I've made. Their ticketing system is also good, and they recently implemented an artificial intelligence agent in their email responses that has helped guide the ticket through the escalation process.

We didn't have anything in place before adopting Automation Anywhere.

For others who are looking for an RPA solution and considering Automation Anywhere, I would encourage you to choose Automation Anywhere if you are hoping to have any level of citizen development involved. 

They make it very easy for anyone to learn and pick up the skills required to develop bots. Beyond citizen development, I think that they have a very reliable platform that is very robust in functionality. 

They can integrate with many applications, and they make it very easy to create automations that scale and are able to automate a wide array of business processes.

When we were looking to implement an RPA solution, one of the other prospective vendors that we looked at was UiPath. One thing that stood out to our company was how approachable Automation Anywhere was compared to UiPath, which seemed to be more developer focused and more technical focused, not as low-code as Automation Anywhere. 

With Automation Anywhere, you could come from anywhere, any level of experience, and any industry. You can learn from their Automation Anywhere University and become a bot developer, which is what we did, since all of our team is composed of accountants who are in the industry first and technical second. Automation Anywhere really provided a solution that let us make that work.

I don't have the exact figures regarding the hours we reduced, but I can say that it is thousands of hours. It's less clear in other departments whether we have seen benefits, as it's more focused on quality of life and relieving pain points. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Automation Anywhere as a nine, really because I believe that they're a very fantastic RPA company. Any company has bumps and bruises, but with Automation Anywhere, it's been a very reliable solution that has been able to achieve anything that we need. 

It's been easy to learn for developers who want to pick it up and easy to manage from a Control Room perspective on the back end. As a company, I just really think that they do a very good job at delivering on the customer's needs.

My main use case for Automation Anywhere in my current company is complex to describe, as I started in June. 

My primary focus has been restructuring the team, creating processes, best practices, and standards. I stopped the whole production, not implementing new automations or enhancements, ensuring we can scale up. 

One of the major business cases we have is invoice payments, where we handle a good number of invoices using IQ Bots. Eventually, we will migrate to Document Automation once we transition to the cloud, which is starting next month, May 19th. Invoice payments are a great use case since we receive different types of invoices from various vendors. 

We use Document Automation to organize information, restructure it, and then grab the information to save it into different systems of records. This is probably, from my perspective, one of the most important cases. Due to my seniority here, I haven't had the opportunity to know too much about the business cases beyond assessing the infrastructure. However, that is one of the critical automations from my perspective.

I've seen many benefits from using Automation Anywhere so far, including having around 50 automations running in production. I can't say right now exactly how much we're saving in dollars, however, there's a measurable benefit, as we work closely with the legal team that performs a lot of manual work, and we help them significantly. That's my main customer right now. Additionally, I have technology and finance as other critical customers, covering probably 80% of the company. As a financial institution focusing on financial advice, we are about to open a digital bank in the next few days.

From my perspective, the most valuable features in Automation Anywhere are its ability to connect to different systems of records. We are only using RPA at a very basic level, not utilizing Intelligent Automation or AI, as it's not part of my contract. Document Automation is still growing and is not 100% mature, however, 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. This capability has empowered us to help the organization interact and eventually automate their processes.

Automation Anywhere could improve by better integrating with DevOps. Currently, it cannot be integrated 100% with DevOps methodology, which many companies are requiring. 

What Automation Anywhere is doing right now is in the right direction, and I would appreciate seeing a better task mining tool. Fortress IQ needs to grow more in terms of maturity; people spend weeks creating PDDs. Having a user-friendly tool to record sessions and generate PDDs in minutes would be fantastic, making the process more efficient.

I started doing RPA Automation Anywhere in 2017, beginning with zero automations. We started the program, and after seven years, we had around 120 automations. 

The stability and reliability of Automation Anywhere's bots depend significantly on how we define our development strategies. If we have good practices, reusable code, a solid framework, and effective development methodologies, the bots can be very stable. 

We have experienced bot failures, however, those failures are usually due to development issues or system glitches, not Automation Anywhere itself.

Automation Anywhere scales with the growing needs of my organization in the cloud, as it adjusts based on our needs. My concern is primarily on the Bot Runner side; I currently have VMs, however, I plan to migrate those to servers, which will help me scale up more effectively by increasing processing power and RAM rather than simply adding more VMs.

Automation Anywhere's support has been great since we signed up for gold support last year. 

Having a technology partner that understands our environment is crucial, as this enables quicker issue resolution without needing lengthy explanations about our setup. Now, we can more easily address issues since the support staff is familiar with our infrastructure, automations, and pain points.

Positive

Prior to adopting Automation Anywhere, my company used Excel macros, which are not enterprise solutions and are more personal automation tools. Some individuals used Power Automate, however, it's not an enterprise solution and doesn't integrate with other tools apart from Microsoft products.

I don't have specific numbers for the reduction of manual work or error reduction, however, the metrics we had were very poor before I arrived. I asked Automation Anywhere to include the COE manager in my contract so I can evaluate and present proper numbers to senior management. However, I see significant benefits in FTEs; I wouldn't say we're eliminating FTEs. Rather, we are helping employees focus on more creative activities.

I haven't evaluated similar tools. I know they exist, however, at my previous company, I was informed I was to use Automation Anywhere before I joined the RPA program. At my current company, they already use it, and while they did evaluate UiPath at some point, the cost was a significant factor in the decision.

My advice to someone considering Automation Anywhere is to ensure proper planning regarding the environment, security, compliance, and governance. It's vital to establish clear metrics to show management the potential savings from automations. After setting this foundation, having best practices, standards, and a solid framework in place will be crucial for success.

Something I would emphasize is the need for more technical discussions at events. Whenever new solutions or ideas arise, I want to understand their implementation, especially concerning data storage and compliance. For example, during a recent conference, I was surprised by the data migration plans discussed for Document Automation, which raised compliance concerns for me. More technical insights would help clarify such issues for all attendees.

I would rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten. The solution is great, however, there are limitations in the COE Manager and Document Automation. If those tools were more mature and meeting scheduling was more immediate, it would significantly enhance the overall experience.

Automation Anywhere overall is a great tool for automation, as it provides a lot of flexibility to work with different other applications.

Our primary use cases with Automation Anywhere revolve around process discovery, where we've used that with many clients to identify areas of opportunity for automation, map those out, and build the core automation to drive the new modernized processes. We originally had done a fair amount of work with robotic process automation types of opportunities in and around revenue cycle with health system clients, ensuring that they get paid appropriately for the services they render.

One of the really interesting use cases that moving into agentic automation brings to the table are more complex use cases, where we can work with things such as medical necessity denials, where payers will deny or downgrade the payment that they provide to the health systems based on a set of medical necessity criteria. 

The introduction of the agentic capabilities allows us to ingest that denial letter, along with the criteria for medical necessity that's required to be met to be paid, and then work with the medical record itself, so the agent can scan the medical record to find out why it's denied matching to the criteria that's required to support it and determine if the criteria are met. If so, it can then draft a letter. 

Traditionally, that's been a highly manual process that requires a clinical resource, which tends to be very expensive, and they can do only about 10 a day or 50 a week. With this kind of automation, the draft letter is provided to them for review and confirmation, allowing them to increase productivity by multiples across the impact and giving them the opportunity to work more effectively in terms of the span of denials, because most health systems never even get to all of them, determining whether they'll take the time to do it based on labor intensity.

With all the things happening with AI in the market right now, one of the big challenges that clients have is ensuring the quality. There are fears around AI that people have about whether the AI will hallucinate and those kinds of things. Having a partner like Automation Anywhere, a company that is known in the industry, is a leader in the industry, brings a lot of credibility to how people look to solve those problems and drive that comfort level. 

Customers also are looking for the kinds of solutions that help enable their workforces to be more effective. Agentic capabilities bring a lot to that. If you think about not just the traditional labor savings, but how you can elevate the performance of the employees that will still be there, the agentic AI brings a lot to the table for those kinds of solutions as well.

Some of the really impactful features of working with Automation Anywhere are the ability to design and partner with their experts to come up with our solutions. Often, we're trying to push the envelope on how either a process has worked traditionally, and trying to see how the automation solutions can change the nature of that process. Automation Anywhere has been a fantastic partner to work through different ways and try different methods and approaches to solving those problems.

Document automation often comes up with our clients, where the processes we're working in still transfer faxes and other traditional documents that must be uploaded, with data extracted and input into a process, whether that's faxes for scheduling appointments or things such as benefit determination, sometimes following up on authorizations for services. Document automation is a really important feature and component to solving these problems.

In terms of areas for improvement and opportunity, Automation Anywhere has been a great partner for us. Many of our clients would want to see scalability in pricing, and while I could say cheaper, that's part of it. Finding creative and scalable pricing structures is important, especially with the move toward agentive automation, which presents challenges in getting clients on board. Clients are interested but reluctant, needing proofs of concept with minimal upfront cost or risk to demonstrate value. 

Additionally, there's potential for Automation Anywhere to integrate conversational types of tools and AI into their tool set, which would be really valuable.

We have been working with Automation Anywhere for several years and we are a partner with them, using them to support many of our solutions for clients, helping to modernize their workforce and bring the digital workforce concept to life with our clients.

In terms of reliability and stability, I have personally found Automation Anywhere to be a highly reliable and stable product, well-known in the market for that.

Many of our clients are just moving into automation, and one of the benefits with Automation Anywhere is the ability to scale and add processes as we improve concepts, helping them get comfortable with the technology while driving more value through expanded automations.

We've received great support from Automation Anywhere. We've developed some new innovative solutions with them requiring significant work from their engineering teams and their partner teams. They've been a great partner to gently vet our ideas, and they're willing to give them a try, which has been excellent.

Very few of our clients at this stage have agentic process automation in place, so in those cases, Automation Anywhere is our preferred partner. 

As we work with clients in identifying opportunities and positioning a solution, Automation Anywhere becomes an easy decision for them. In the traditional RPA space, while some clients may have other vendors, many do not have anything in place. We often work through how to move to the Automation Anywhere platform, which is made easier by their good job of facilitating the switch from other platforms.

The return on investment for our clients working with Automation Anywhere solutions typically shows at least three or four times in the first year and sometimes double that in outer years, arising from a combination of labor savings, improved quality, and reduction in process failures.

Some of the benefits that we've seen with our clients are substantial labor savings of 30% to 70%, depending on the processes that we often see in the ability to reduce labor costs. 

We see improved quality and the elimination of process failures, which can lead to multi-million dollar savings in things such as denials with our clients, addressing how much they're writing off that they can't collect from third parties. 

The elimination of process failures is a significant opportunity for savings, with typical savings being millions, if not tens of millions, for many of our clients due to areas such as insurance verifications, failure to get authorizations, and timely follow-ups on claims to ensure that we submit the required information to the payers.

With all the things happening with AI in the market right now, one of the big challenges that clients have is ensuring the quality, with fears about whether the AI will hallucinate, and those kinds of things. Having a partner like Automation Anywhere, which is known in the industry as a leader, brings a lot of credibility to how people look to solve those problems and drive comfort. They also seek solutions that help enable their workforces to be more effective, and agentive capabilities bring a lot to that. If you think about not just the traditional labor savings, but how to elevate the performance of employees that will still be there, agentive AI brings a lot to the table for those kinds of solutions as well.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Automation Anywhere an eight depending on the day. They've been a great partner for us in developing new solutions, and when we've deployed them, we see high reliability. The brand is well-respected in the market, making clients receptive to the name and bringing credibility to our solutions. Overall, I give them high marks and enjoy working with them.

We are using Automation Anywhere majorly for automation, automating web applications or desktop applications.

The best features of Automation Anywhere include the user interface, which is quite easy to use now compared to its previous versions that were more difficult. The interface is user-friendly, and all code is visible during coding, showing what is going ahead and what follows in the code. This is not available in other RPA tools such as UiPath, which makes it a standout feature.

Additionally, Automation Anywhere is robust and the support is good. We get connected with the support team whenever required.

Co-Pilot is used for the processes involving human input while automating tasks. In the context of Automation Anywhere, it allows us to create various forms to facilitate this interaction. By incorporating user feedback during the automation process, we can streamline operations effectively. Overall, using Co-Pilot is straightforward and user-friendly, making it easy to build automations based on the forms we create.

There are several areas for improvement in Automation Anywhere that have been suggested by my team and colleagues during their Imagine event. They need work on WLM and when handshaking with their own application, as there is significant wiring required from a developer perspective. The WLM could be much easier and more understandable. It should be more accessible to developers because in the WLM, if a solution is developed, it cannot be tested in the dev environment. Testing must be done in the runner environment.

From a developer's perspective, there are fewer integration facilities, particularly AI integrations, compared to other tools. The pricing could also be improved.

Automation Anywhere has been in use for about nine years.

The stability of Automation Anywhere can be rated a nine out of ten. It is good.

In terms of scalability, there have been no significant issues. Hundreds of bots have been developed without facing any problems. The scalability can be rated a nine out of ten.

In my current organization, 10 to 15 employees are working with Automation Anywhere. The larger team in other RPA department are using UiPath.

They often provide good solutions, but sometimes they are unable to resolve issues, requiring users to find solutions independently, which can be time-consuming. I would rate their technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We are using it as a SaaS solution. If we choose an on-premises solution, we receive a bundle that we need to install. This installation can be done on Azure, any cloud service, or on our own server machines. On the other hand, when we opt for a SaaS solution, they create control rooms and set everything up for us. We are only given an access key, or what could be referred to as a license key. By entering this license key, we can directly access the system. We can typically receive the license key quickly, often within a minute, for their cloud version. That's what I know about these solutions.

It requires some maintenance, but they are actively addressing it. They install patches and provide updates for the package versions. As a user of the SaaS solution, we don’t need to worry about these details. However, for the on-premises version, I believe users need to manually implement the solutions. Whenever there are updates or new package versions available, they deliver them to us, and we must install them in the control room.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere is very straightforward. It requires just clicking a button to upgrade multiple components including packages, solutions, control rooms, and the bot engine.

Regarding bot maintenance, if there are no changes in the web application or desktop application and no machine issues, bots can run for three to four years without human intervention.

The time saved by implementing Automation Anywhere depends on the number of applications involved. With fewer applications, it can save up to 40% to 50% of time. However, with complex applications involving multiple pages and interactions, the savings shift toward FTE savings, with time savings reducing to 10% or 20%. Sometimes it may take longer than manual user operations.

The pricing of Automation Anywhere is less than UiPath but more than Power Automate, placing it in the mid-range. It can be considered expensive and could potentially be lowered.

When comparing with other automation tools such as Power Automate and UiPath, all tools address similar problem statements but with different approaches. Each has unique features and limitations.

Technical skills are essential for RPA. If you know any programming language and have some technical understanding, you will find it easier to get into RPA. However, if you lack knowledge of programming languages, it may be challenging for you. Learning RPA involves keeping up with new features and updates, so we are continuously learning the platform. It took me about one to two months to fully understand how to complete a process on my own.

I would rate it a six out of ten. They can refine their pricing and improve the handshaking features and integrations. 

Our primary use case for Automation Anywhere began with order processing, specifically the order-to-cash process, where we manually enter orders from the customer through PDFs and other methods. 

We started from four bots and have grown to close to 60 bots at this point, expanding significantly from two or three processes to ten times that scale over the last five or six years.

Our document automation, specifically with IQ Bot as part of the automation, has significantly improved efficiency and proficiency, allowing us to be currently engaged in proof of concept initiatives aimed at further advancing the document automation process with generative AI.

Document automation has indeed been beneficial in handling large volumes of documents in our organization, where we process product-related data sheets that range from 80 to 120 pages, efficiently extracting data that would take a human several hours to read manually. I can confidently say that document automation saves us time, as it takes human effort significantly down from five to seven minutes manually per PO. It is being executed much faster by the bots.

One of the notable benefits we've realized from Automation Anywhere is a significant reduction in errors when processing data, which improves both revenue accuracy and operational efficiency.

In the age of agentic AI, the big challenge is moving to the next step. We are currently running all RPAs now. So robotic automation is the key for us now, and we are moving to the next generation of automation, which is agentic processing. We need a helping hand to make sure that our company strategy and the goal can be achieved with this agentic automation. This year, we have had a big push from our leaders to be involved, more and more, on agentic processing. That's a focus for us. 

As we evolve from RPA to APA, we are at the early stages. We're just moving over. The first step we are taking is a document automation with AI capability on top of it. That's our first step that we are doing at this point of time. Eventually, we'll get there, but it's really early.

We are using some AI. There are 20 to 30 tools at this point. So we are trying to bring in Automation Anywhere into one of those ten. It's in the evaluation phase at this point. There's a big team working on it. We want to get the right tool both legally and via a vetting process before we can bring any tool into the company. That's an ongoing process. 

Automation Anywhere can be improved by integrating self-correction capabilities into the bots, particularly as we develop RPA, where changes in environment paths require additional redeveloping efforts.

We've used the solution for around five to six years. 

There have been no downtime issues since we migrated to cloud. The availability has been good. 

Automation Anywhere is scaling well. 

As we aim to keep up with current technology trends, we are working on enhancing our growth rate moving forward.

We have around 2500 people worldwide.

The support from Automation Anywhere has been outstanding, with timely responses to submitted tickets and effective resolutions for issues that have arisen.

Prior to adopting Automation Anywhere, we used B2B automation for a long time for our needs, and the limitations of other tools in handling complex PDF transactions were significant factors that prompted us to consider a change.

I was significantly involved in the deployment of Automation Anywhere, being the sole person from my company starting this automation journey, and we faced some initial challenges, particularly with hardware setup when we transitioned from on-premises to cloud, which eventually became smoother.

I've seen a return on investment with Automation Anywhere, as we've measured time saved, starting from 50 days per quarter to about 1500 days per quarter with the deployment of bots, equating to substantial human time savings.

The pricing is average. It's not an expensive tool. The pricing is mid-range.

Before selecting Automation Anywhere, we considered several tools including UiPath, which we had set up for financial functions and Kofax for SAP automation, but ultimately chose Automation Anywhere for its scalability across the company.

For companies considering Automation Anywhere, my advice is to prioritize identifying and automating the most critical processes rather than trying to automate everything, ensuring that a thorough study backs these decisions to maximize support from leadership and demonstrate success. 

We are not utilizing Automation Anywhere COE manager, but we have developed our in-house COE manager since we started the process independently in 2019.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The use cases for Automation Anywhere are industry-agnostic and sector-agnostic, allowing for automation of processes that involve human interaction, mundane tasks, and large volumes. With the help of AI, we can now automate a lot of unstructured data, which wasn't possible before, so it's not limited to any specific sector or process. Whether it's HR, marketing, sales, operations, or engineering design, any of those can be considered for automation.

The main benefits of Automation Anywhere include improved operational efficiency, enhanced productivity savings, increased cost savings, new revenue streams, and a reduction in regulatory human errors. These are some of the major benefits it provides. For example, if a human takes one hour to perform a transaction that involves navigating through multiple systems and inputting data, Automation Anywhere can reduce that time significantly. The bot can complete the task in about 20 minutes, saving roughly 40 minutes per transaction, which translates to a 60%-66% time saving, enhancing overall productivity and cost efficiency.

They have introduced numerous AI-related enhancements in their product, making them the first among their competitors to develop a reasoning engine. Their PRE reasoning engine is particularly noteworthy, and they have quickly integrated Generative AI into their document automation product. Additionally, they offer a variety of other AI features and have designed the platform to be cloud-native. The AI features they have implemented stand out; they are indeed leading the pack. This strategy is impressive and effectively empowers their product with a wide range of AI capabilities, which are increasingly important in today’s tech landscape, especially with the rise of AI, Generative AI, and Agentic AI.

Automation Anywhere also provides Agentic AI-related APIs and is currently testing Agentic process automation in its early stages. In terms of product capabilities and AI integration, I would definitely rate them a ten out of ten. They are the fastest to reach this level of advancement compared to others, who seem to be lagging behind. For example, Blue Prism is progressing quite slowly, and while Power Automate has some AI features, they do not match the scale that Automation Anywhere has achieved.

Its pricing definitely needs to be more competitive. When licensing costs are high, we cannot use this tool for automation. Instead, we might opt for a lower-cost tool like Power Automate which is 50% less expensive.

Power Automate offers very seamless integration with the Microsoft ecosystem, including Azure cloud services and other Microsoft products. In contrast, Automation Anywhere has to rely on external LLMs for integrations. If Automation Anywhere can improve the ease of these integrations and provide them natively within the platform, it would greatly enhance its appeal.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for over the last eight years, although not extensively in my current role. In previous journeys, I have used it for around three to four years. Currently, we use Automation Anywhere, but not extensively.

At this moment, I'm not sure about the stability of Automation Anywhere, but in previous experiences, I faced challenges with stability, which required ticket submissions for support. We encountered several challenges related to platform and technical issues. For instance, sessions would occasionally get disconnected unexpectedly. In those cases, we would raise a ticket with the vendor to get support. However, since we haven't been using the system extensively, we haven't faced many issues.

All these automation platforms, including Automation Anywhere, are highly scalable; depending on volume, you can adjust the number of bots, scaling instantaneously in the cloud. For on-prem solutions, one must ensure they have the necessary infrastructure ready for scaling.

While it is easy to scale with Automation Anywhere, I have not experienced extensive scaling in my previous encounters. The maximum number of bots we had was around 20.

I haven't raised many tickets recently to evaluate their technical support, but I know they have a dedicated partner manager. It has been good in my previous experience.

Positive

We are also using UiPath, Blue Prism, Power Automate, and the Microsoft stack. Mainly, the license costs of UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism are high, so we use Power Automate and Power Platform heavily.

It is generally easy to deploy. We use Automation Anywhere with both AWS and Azure.

Maintenance is indeed required for Automation Anywhere; you have to follow the vendor's product patches and version upgrades to keep it maintained.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere follows a standard process that they provide detailed instructions for, and we adhere to those guidelines. The upgrade process feels similar to any other software platform; I don't find anything particularly complex or different about it.

There is a separate team for bot maintenance, and if the bots are stable, maintenance needs tend to be low. However, if issues arise, maintenance efforts can significantly increase.

The return on investment from Automation Anywhere varies based on the business case and the benefits versus costs involved; for simpler RPA use cases, ROI can typically be achieved within a year.

Pricing needs to be more competitive, both in terms of licenses and overall expenses. This is crucial because many use cases cannot be automated if it isn't cost-effective.

We have not extensively tried Automation Anywhere with business users because they have added a lot of AI features that are difficult for them to understand. We also do not want to encourage business users to create automations that do not comply with regulations, compliance, and best practices, which presents a risk. Therefore, we've only utilized it within the CoE team for now. 

For existing developers, the learning curve for Automation Anywhere is easy to pick up. However, for business users, it might take some time, especially if they lack a programming background.

I have heard about the Automation Co-Pilot, and it sounds very powerful and useful. The Co-Pilot can generate code based on a natural language prompt, which is a substantial feature as it can reduce development time by 30%-40%, allowing faster shipment of code to production. 

In terms of integration, Automation Anywhere acts as a tool used to develop automation that connects to various systems, such as SAP, Excel, Outlook, and web applications. It doesn't integrate with other solutions directly but helps in automating processes that involve multiple systems. The platform provides capabilities for building various integrations, and that is part of what they sell. Automation Anywhere is fundamentally an automation platform that enables performance across workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents. API integration is possible with Automation Anywhere, but if specific APIs do not already exist, there is no way to create a new API directly within the platform. For that, one needs to create a new API using languages such as Java, Python, or C# before integrating it with Automation Anywhere.

Our organization places high priority on automation and AI. We are using the Microsoft ecosystem for many of our use cases.

For organizations considering Automation Anywhere, I advise that if you are focusing on AI features such as Generative AI or agentic process automation, it's a great choice as they are front runners in incorporating these functionalities early on. However, if licensing costs are a concern, the Microsoft stack would be more beneficial.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

Our main use cases for Automation Anywhere are anything that's end-to-end automations. We initially used to do finance and HR only, however, eventually graduated to different verticals and departments. Our use cases have been predominantly high-value, high ROI, and anything that can be repeatable, algorithmic, and automated.

Automation Anywhere has significantly improved our ability to automate both standard and complex business processes. Initially, we focused on traditional rule-based automation to streamline end-to-end workflows in functions like finance and HR, which delivered strong ROI.

More recently, we’ve expanded into HyperAutomation where we have used Automation Anywhere to orchestrate the end to end AI solutions. These tools have allowed us to tackle tasks that previously required manual intervention by enabling role-based, persona-driven agents that make near human-level decisions with human oversight 

One of the most valuable features of Automation Anywhere is its low-code/no-code framework, which enables us to quickly build reusable automation templates. This has made it easier for both developers and citizen developers to scale automation across teams.

As a cloud-native platform, it offers an intuitive and accessible development experience, which has accelerated adoption and reduced infrastructure overhead.

While the platform’s features and enterprise support have been excellent, one area for improvement is greater flexibility in packaging and pricing. It would be helpful to have more modular options that allow us to selectively license features based on our needs without committing to the full suite.

This would improve cost efficiency and make it easier to align the platform’s capabilities with our automation strategy as it evolves.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for over ten years. I play different roles in consulting, being within the product, and trying to be the implementer, leading to multiple implementations.

I would rate the stability and availability of Automation Anywhere at 9 out of 10. Since moving to the cloud platform, we’ve experienced minimal downtime, and overall reliability has been excellent. It’s one of the most stable enterprise automation platforms we’ve worked with.

Automation Anywhere has scaled well with our evolving business needs. We've been able to expand usage by adding more creators and runners as required, and the licensing process has been straightforward and efficient. The platform has supported both incremental growth and larger strategic shifts without friction, which gives us confidence in its ability to scale further as our automation footprint grows.

I would rate Automation Anywhere support a seven out of ten. Enhancing the support tiers might be beneficial, and pricing has been a primary challenge, with a need for cheaper options and more tiered support.

We do not have premium support. While we possess a basic support package that has been really good, we are considering premium support packages for the future, however, we have received ample assistance from Automation Anywhere for critical issues we've faced.

We previously used earlier versions of Automation Anywhere, and during our transition from v11 to A360, we evaluated the improvements through a series of proof-of-concepts. What stood out was the enhanced developer experience, broader connector support, and the overall seamlessness of development and deployment in A360 compared to prior versions. These improvements solidified our decision to continue with Automation Anywhere as our automation platform of choice.

Straightforward, and we were able to apply all templates and best practices when we rolled out the solution internally

Mix of both internal as well as vendor team. Vendor experience has been great

We've seen strong ROI from Automation Anywhere in two main areas. First, traditional automation has helped us streamline end-to-end processes in functions like finance and HR, resulting in measurable operational efficiency. Second, AI orchestration has allowed us to manage and scale multiple AI-driven use cases effectively, extending the impact of automation beyond rule-based tasks.

While we can't share specific metrics, the overall value—in terms of time savings, consistency, and scalability—has been significant.

In our experience, setup and licensing with Automation Anywhere have been smooth and straightforward. Our vendor management team worked closely with a partner and Automation Anywhere to handle licensing, and the cloud-based setup was efficiently managed by their team. We've used the platform for over 4 years without any major licensing or deployment issues.

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Our use cases for Automation Anywhere primarily started with finance and accounting, order-to-cash, supply chain processes, and then reporting areas, and now we are going towards more end-to-end automation. 

The main challenge or objective I am looking to solve with agentic process automation is that APA, again, the next step after RPA, is we're looking at more cognitive, probabilistic and cognitive solutions using NLM, which is also self-healing, self-learning. 

The primary use cases start with procurement, payment or customer management, order management cycle.

Automation Anywhere's features benefit our company since we deal with a myriad of customers, and we're talking about different security protocols, requirements, and we are a global company. That puts us in a position where we have to comply with the local regulations of each country. Automation Anywhere follows the same protocols, and they are compliant on GDPR and other areas, making it easy for us to expand.

What I appreciate most about Automation Anywhere is the high degree of interoperability, and they have both on-premises and cloud versions, which allows us to ensure that we are properly following the protocols and ensuring seamless integration with our native systems. 

In the age of agentic AI, the biggest challenges for me and my company occur when different players come up with their own copilots. The key factor that will help us from a scalability standpoint is integration. There are multiple ways to achieve this, not just through the presentation UI layer, but also through the database side or using an API. A high degree of versatility of the tool and interoperability is essential, not just from Automation Anywhere but also from other applications, because if they are too closed, it will not allow for seamless end-to-end automation.

We're doing a POC with the AI Agent Studios. It's promising. They are trying to address some of our concerns.

We have a robust AI governance approach in our company. We're trying to play with some low-risk cases. We have a good framework, and that's getting implemented alongside agentic AI.

Document automation has been phenomenal. There have been a lot of changes and updates to it, and it is serving a very good purpose right now with document classification and document automation coming into play. Using AI enabled framework, we're able to fetch the details from it and also give input to our downstream processes.

Document automation is definitely a tool that will help us provide a better experience for our employees and our legal departments or any department that is dependent on documents that we're getting from outside parties, which are nonstandard, nonstructured. It helps us from an overall digitization of a documentation and its summarization of it. At the same time, using the cognitive abilities of an LLM, we are able to trigger actions.

For some of our purchase order processes, we did a pilot. It provided about a 90% reduction in time. You don't have to read the entire email and you don't have to read the PDF. It reads it, contextualizes it, and finds all the key areas important to the purchase order.

Automation Anywhere has been promising a lot in the last three years, and the roadmap they laid out on APA is definitely going to help businesses. A lot of work has gone into it, and the latest APA-related releases are very good. 

The key area where improvement can happen is understanding the different perspectives and different industries that they're serving in terms of industry-wise use cases. 

The improvement points can be summarized as trying to provide more accessibility for those AI agents they have built so that people can start testing APA. Additionally, they should try to evangelize more APA with organizations by allowing them to try and test first before they can go for a wider option.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for six years. We started with the initial version, and now we are going towards the cloud version.

Automation Anywhere helps me overcome the specific challenges and we're working very closely with them. We did bring up some of the issues that we want to address. Automation Anywhere was able to help us by sharing best practices, how other players are doing, and how we can still use Automation Anywhere and be compliant with the requirements while respecting the security protocols and the identity protocols.

Positive

We evaluated other products, and we decided on Automation Anywhere, which was easier for us as we went towards the on-premise solution. We didn't try other products. We were thinking about it since it complied with all the requirements.

The deployment was not difficult. Automation Anywhere helped us. 

There is maintenance needed. You need to keep on updating it as it gets complicated from a security system standpoint. You have to make your software more resilient to handle hackers and to ensure that no vulnerabilities. That's a work in progress, always.

From a pricing standpoint, the value that we drove when we first hopped onto this journey was significant compared to the ROI. The ROI was significant compared to the investment we made. 

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Automation Anywhere has been very open in terms of what's possible and what's not possible. We are always looking at trying to play within the boundaries of budgets while delivering business impact.

Overall, the pricing strategy has been fairly good for us, and it works for us. When we're looking at adding enhancements, that's when it gets a little difficult. It's all about getting as much bang as possible for the buck that we're spending, leading to hard negotiations. However, they've been understanding. Automation Anywhere understands the business needs and tries its best to deliver.

I did not consider other products in my journey, as this work was already done by our IT team, so we didn't have to reinvest the effort.

We are moving from on-premises to the cloud. We're looking at Copilot. We expect it to accelerate and help us in the future. We don't have to start from ground zero to get to the next step.

We are not using the COE manager; we have our own tool.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Right now, my use case for Automation Anywhere is that we're in the middle of an AP invoice automation project, automating invoice entry into our Oracle EBS system.

What I appreciate the most about using Automation Anywhere is that I find it very easy to use; the connectors are great, the layout's great, the functionality is great, and it just works, so it's pretty good. Using Automation Anywhere has improved our company significantly, as we are doing over eight to 10,000 invoices a month, which people had to do before, while now the automated process is doing that without too much human intervention, saving probably about at least two to possibly three FTEs per week.

Regarding the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Automation Anywhere, I think it could always be cheaper, but it seems fair and it's a good product. I think they should figure out a way to allow development environments that don't require licensing for unattended so I can test without taking away production licenses.

Automation Anywhere is already pretty robust and we have not run into a problem connecting everything; we connect everything from Office 365 to Oracle databases, to Oracle EBS systems, to Workday, to other systems, and I have not found a use case that Automation Anywhere hasn't been able to accommodate, so we are really happy with everything we've seen.

My biggest suggestion would be to allow us to set up test and development licenses or environments that don't use unattended licenses needed for production. Currently we have six licenses and can use only four in production due to the need for test licenses that don't get used often, sometimes just once a month, while we either have to switch them back and forth or deal with not having all the licenses we need. I understand they don't want abuse, but it seems having a better way to handle this could be beneficial.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for approximately nine months.

I have not really seen an impact yet from Automation Anywhere's visibility in the automation lifecycle, as we are in the very beginning of it, but it does look having a good framework.

Automation Anywhere has helped me overcome these challenges as it, along with another tool called Hyperscience, has completely changed how we process invoices, automating what humans used to do from beginning to end. Automation Anywhere has helped me achieve my automation goals, as we are in the middle of it and it's helping month after month, allowing us to continue to add suppliers and invoices while it just does what it needs to do.

I was not using another solution before Automation Anywhere. We started this journey with Automation Anywhere and have actually added Power Automate into the mix, especially around end users, as we're a big Microsoft shop and everybody has some form of a Power Automate license. We decided on Automation Anywhere over UiPath and Blue Prism based on what the product could do for us.

Document automation has impacted efficiency and productivity massively, as we are processing approximately 8 to 10,000 invoices every month, with probably another 8 to 10,000 more to go, different suppliers and a different accounting structure, and it handles everything we throw at it. I have measured the time saved by using document automation in document processing, approximately noticing we are at roughly three minutes per invoice, saving about 60 man-hours per week.

I don't know the biggest differences between Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism and UiPath, as I wasn't part of that conversation and I have not looked at Blue Prism or UiPath. My understanding of UiPath is that they claim to have a lot of features, though not much of it is as relevant as their marketing material might suggest. Regarding Power Automate, I have delved deep there too and noticed they struggle with having both cloud-based and desktop-based functionalities, making it difficult.

The main challenge I was trying to solve by intelligent process automation around AP invoices was that the current AP team had a backlog of a couple months of invoices, taking them quite a long time, and it didn't become feasible to keep adding more people to a team that already had many, so they needed a solution and the automated process was that solution, allowing us to grow and add more invoices and suppliers without needing more people and reducing the backlog to under a week.

I am not utilizing the AI Agent Studio in my automation process yet, as we don't have a license for that, but we're exploring it. Both I and another person on the team are in training that Automation Anywhere had a few weeks back for agent AI, which is really interesting and we're excited about, though we don't have a license for it just yet.

My impression of the AI governance features in maintaining compliance and data integrity within my company is that we are just starting to explore that, and it looks very helpful. We are setting up a Center of Automation to solidify those rules and needs for governance, and the tool itself seems to do a good job at facilitating that.

I am starting to utilize Automation Anywhere CoE, as once we started getting most of the invoices in, we are having meetings about starting this project this week and next month. I perceive the cloud-based nature of Automation Anywhere CoE Manager as effective for managing our automation pipeline. We use the SaaS product exclusively at this point without anything installed internally, except for some internal machines that have Automation Anywhere installed from a client perspective.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Automation Anywhere a 10.