Automation Anywhere Reviews

The main use cases that we have currently for Automation Anywhere are for our finance department, where we tend to have a lot of manual labor regarding the whole process of paying for everything within our company. We use Automation Anywhere in order to streamline these processes and make it really efficient for the department to do their internal processes.

What I appreciate the most about Automation Anywhere is that, from a development and developer side, it is really intuitive to do the whole automation, which also makes it easier to do all the support side of the code. It is really great for the user to be able to see everything that is happening in the code, such as what could be wrong or right. 

At the end of the day, the effort that you put in has exponential benefits, giving you many advantages from your lines of code, which is amazing.

One of the problems we have found with Automation Anywhere is that the rollout of new upgrades or tools is not readily available for everyone to know about the new benefits offered. For example, the Imagine event is a great way for everyone to learn about what is coming and the new benefits, but outside of Imagine, it can be difficult to know what is new.

The whole company has been using Automation Anywhere for around four years; I have been using it for around two and a half years.

At Volkswagen Mexico, we just use Automation Anywhere. However, I believe that Volkswagen Germany uses another tool. The decision to implement Automation Anywhere at Volkswagen Mexico was made by Volkswagen Germany. I do not know what considerations they took into account, but they chose to go with Automation Anywhere.

Since Automation Anywhere is intuitive for the developer, it is easier for them to express to the business side of the company what the benefits and opportunities are, making that communication really easy so we can get ideas from the business and then develop them from our knowledge. It is also easier to onboard people onto this tool.

The main challenge with agentic process automation that we are trying to solve is the whole implementation of artificial intelligence within our company, which is crucial because everything that has to do with security and all our databases requires us to be super careful. We are currently facing the issue of ensuring careful implementation while realizing the opportunities for implementing these agentic solutions within our company, which I expect will happen in the next couple of years.

In the age of agentic AI, understanding what all the things that agentic AI can provide for our company means focusing on translating AI technology into actual use cases. The challenge lies in prioritizing and making the link between actual use cases and the tools available, especially since AI technology presents many options but can leave us uncertain about which to tackle first.

We are currently migrating to document automation; we previously used an older version before starting this migration, but we are just at the beginning. In Mexico, where our company is based, we face issues regarding obtaining new licenses, as this has to be done through a third-party company. This limitation affects what we can get because there are certain packages we have to purchase, restricting our ability to acquire specific licenses, such as for testing AI agents, since we must buy the entire package to get just one license. Therefore, that presents challenges when trying new things.

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine because we want to try new things and incorporate more innovations into our company that Automation Anywhere offers; however, the nervousness about testing them poses challenges, which is the only reason I would not rate it a ten.

I have used it for multiple use cases across various domains. I started with automating use cases in the utility industry, such as customer billing and processing meter readings. Those were the initial use cases for which I used it. Currently, I am using it for a transport company in the U.S., where we process their invoice documents, perform three-way matching, manage their supply chain records, and handle daily billing bots. All these implementations have been successful.

For the transport company, we have identified a use case. Their ticketing team is manually processing all the incidents that occur during that day. We are now collecting all the documents and information about previously resolved tickets. We are creating a knowledge base out of it, and we will use that along with the AI agents that Automation Anywhere has. We will create an AI agent that will help take care of tickets by learning from the knowledge base. We are working on the PoC, and within the next quarter, we will be able to implement that.

We have implemented a Generative AI solution using Automation Anywhere and ChatGPT for email management. We implemented it for semantic analysis and sentiment analysis. One of our clients wanted us to create a bot that automatically fetches all the reviews from all of the social media platforms, including Twitter, and create a knowledge base within their own platform or database, whether the review is positive, negative, or neutral. For that, we leveraged the ChatGPT plugin along with Automation Anywhere. We created a bot that reads all their reviews, does semantic and sentiment analysis, and accurately describes them as positive, negative, or neutral.

We have not yet used Automation Co-Pilot, but we plan to implement several use cases. One use case involves integrating AI agents with Automation Co-Pilot for conversational AI. Users can input queries, and AI agents will run prompts to fetch required details directly in Automation Co-Pilot. This is particularly beneficial when the process SMEs need to verify post-bot run actions and address any data issues. Currently, the RPA support team is asked to rerun bots. We aim to enable SMEs to prompt bots for reruns, reducing response time from different time zones from five to six hours to immediate actions, significantly boosting productivity.

By implementing Automation Anywhere, we wanted to reduce the manual effort required for various processes for the clients. Previously, the client's accounting team had to collect all the bills, and based on the vendor, upload those to a particular portal. They daily receive bills for more than 250 vendors. We have now automated the process. There is no manual intervention. Earlier, this effort used to take more than 300 hours per month with more than ten people, whereas now, it does not take more than 50 hours per month, and they have only five people.

We have done integrations with Oracle NetSuite and Google APIs. We have done automation with ChatGPT and Claude AI. We are now leveraging Document Automation along with AI agents. We have also done integration with Anthropic. The integration is quite smooth and seamless. 

Document Automation is a game changer. Earlier, with IQ Bot, we achieved partial automation—around 80% of the process was automated. With GenAI and Google Vision OCR now integrated into Document Automation, end-to-end automation is achievable, even with unstructured documents.

The AI agent automation is noteworthy. Everyone is moving from RPA to agentic process automation. I had a chance to delve deeper into it at the Imagine event in Bangalore in 2024, where I engaged hands-on with AI agents. We are exploring use cases to create our own AI agents, which is exciting.

The generative recorder and BPMN converter features are also impressive. If we have recorded the complete process flowchart in the .BPMN file, uploading this file into Automation Anywhere results in a complete bot framework, reducing development efforts by 30%.

Additionally, the generative recorder's ability to handle changes in web portal elements ensures process continuity and notifies developers of updates, aiding in environmental change understanding. If any element changes on the existing web portal on which the bot is currently working, the generative recorder can record and capture the action. The bot will automatically understand at the run time that the particular object has changed, and it will automatically take actions to complete the process and ensure that it does not fail because of that one change.

AI agents need further improvements. AI agent technology in agentic process automation is still evolving. We have only scratched the surface, and there are many potential use cases yet to be explored. As technology advances, I believe it will enable us to implement more comprehensive automation solutions.

Document Automation has issues related to speed. When I compare Document Automation with IQ Bot, IQ Bot is faster than Document Automation. My understanding is that they are still evolving Document Automation, and this issue of slowness will be resolved in the upcoming .35 version, so we are good with that.

They are working on signature identification and validations for handwritten documents. Currently, we are able to extract data out of scanned but digital images, but there is still scope for improvement for handwritten documents.

I started using Automation Anywhere in 2015, so it has been over eight years.

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

I would rate Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten for scalability.

Our clients are small to medium organizations. We have seven people working with Automation Anywhere.

I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We have completed several migration projects, moving existing bots from platforms like Blue Prism, UiPath, and Power Automate to Automation Anywhere. This was due to limitations with these platforms, such as Power Automate's compatibility issues with legacy systems, which resulted in partial automation.

Customers seeking end-to-end automation have found Automation Anywhere to be the best tool. We analyzed all bots and processes to determine that Automation Anywhere met all requirements. We converted their process documents and redeveloped bots in Automation Anywhere, resulting in successful end-to-end automation. 

Licensing costs for Blue Prism and UiPath are higher compared to Automation Anywhere, making the latter's ROI more appealing. 

Automation Anywhere is currently leading with GenAI and AI solutions. UiPath is also good, but they are still defining its market position. They are a bit confused about whether they want to project themselves as market leaders in AI, RPA, or agentic process automation. Automation Anywhere has already released five to six features directly connected with AI, not just for the customers but for the developers. Blue Prism recently came out with the cloud version. They are still exploring how they can leverage more AI into their platform. Power Automate works great with Microsoft products, but it fails badly outside the Microsoft ecosystem.

Automation Anywhere has enhanced a lot since we first started using it. At the time, it had the client/server architecture. It was not on the cloud. We had to manually install Automation Anywhere on each and every desktop. In 2019, they shifted to the cloud, so we just have to install the bot agent on any computer we want to use as a device. It does not matter whether it is a bot creator or a bot runner. That has improved the installation setup and reduced the configuration time by 80%. Previously, we had to manually install the client and control room and configure them. That was a tedious task, whereas now, because of the cloud, its deployment is very simple and user-friendly, and it has reduced the earlier effort by 80%.

Almost all clients use cloud deployment, but a Korean client has an on-premises setup because they are very diligent about the data. Cloud deployment is easier than on-premise deployment.

Cloud deployments typically take a few hours, around four to five hours. On-premises deployments can take up to two or three business days due to customer environment restrictions and infrastructure limitations. If conditions are optimal, the setup can be completed in one day. For the cloud, deployment time is much shorter, taking only about four to five hours.

The updates happen automatically for cloud deployments, whereas for on-premises setups, we have to download the new release files from the portal and manually do the updates.

In terms of bot maintenance, currently, our team is working for three customers, and there are 105 bots. Our team of seven people is handling these 105 bots. We are doing 24/7 service and daily spend four to five hours on average for bot monitoring and support.

We have one person for the cloud deployment. For on-premises, we have two to three people.

It is not cheap, with costs ranging between 700 to 800 dollars per month. While Power Automate is cheaper at 15 dollars per month, Automation Anywhere offers superior features, user-friendliness, and smoothness. Many customers are transitioning from UiPath and Blue Prism to Automation Anywhere, acknowledging its value. 

The pricing is justified and on-point. There are bulk packages that include licenses, Automation Co-Pilot, and Document Automation. Both Automation Anywhere and partners like us offer discounts.

For non-technical users, I would recommend the citizen developer program on Automation Anywhere University. They have a training portal where people can register themselves and do the learning paths. There is a learning path for new developers or people who do not have much technical knowledge but want to start their automation journey. They can go ahead and do that citizen development training and complete that learning path to understand it in a better way.

It takes about six months to learn it and start using it. The best part about the training is that you can also do hands-on training along with it. You can simultaneously learn and implement it. Six months is a good enough time to get your basics cleared and start your automation journey.

I would highly recommend Automation Anywhere, but the recommendation depends on the customer's specific requirements. For example, for automating tasks strictly within the Microsoft ecosystem, Power Automate will suit. However, for incorporating third-party applications like Oracle NetSuite, I would recommend Automation Anywhere due to its broader capabilities beyond Microsoft applications. Automation Anywhere easily accommodates diverse market use cases to meet customer requirements and scale effectively.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

I use Automation Anywhere for various things, especially in most cases, like automating most of my tasks because I'm always having multiple tasks such as email deliveries and so on. It helps me to automate all those tasks.

Being something we use daily also helps us with document management and file automation. It simplifies all our file management. It is easier to navigate because we are used to it. It helps us with editing, scanning, extracting some data, and so on. It's something that we use commonly in our organization.

I use Copilot, previously known as AARI, and it's not bad, as it is good for that in-app natural language experience, finding the running automations, and then the tasks at hand. It's not a bad one and simplifies our work.

Automation has helped us improve productivity in that it first of all saves time. With that, of course, that improves things, and we can now do other tasks. On top of that, because of the automation, at least we are able to eliminate those human errors, maybe missing out on something. It is really good for improving our productivity and has helped us a lot.

I'm just a user, an end-user of Automation Anywhere. I have no affiliations. For improvement, perhaps what I can say is that sometimes I get challenges with the customer support team. When I contact them, they are sometimes busy, and I get delays in replies. They always reply, but at a later hour on some days, although of course, some days they are responsive.

I started using it earlier in June last year, but it's not that I had some stopover and then again just resumed recently.

I wouldn't complain about the stability of Automation Anywhere. It's stable. There's nothing that crashes or any abrupt shutdowns. It's always consistent.

The scalability is also good. It's a good one.

The quality of the support is a good one, but it's just those delays when we need immediate help. I would rate it a seven out of ten. It's not bad and good, but there are only delays when they are replying and they take some time. Not every day, but of course, some days.

Positive

I had used Blue Prism for a short time, but I didn't have a good experience, so I had to change.

The learning curve of Automation Anywhere was a steep one. It was hard to get used to the software initially, but then after some time, I was okay with everything. Initially, the deployment was a little bit tricky to get used to, but with time, we are now okay. Initially, it was a little bit complex.

I have an estimate for how long it took to deploy it. I estimated around two to three months.

It being a decision made by our big IT team, everyone also has their other reasons why we had to switch from Blue Prism to this one.

Both are good, but personally I would prefer Automation Anywhere. It's much easier for me, easier to navigate, no coding is required, simple to use, and pricing is fair.

I got the link on the platform of Automation Anywhere. It was an invite through a form.

Currently, I have no specific feature I would demand in Automation Anywhere. Of course, I would be happy if they added any other feature that would make my work easier. Although I'm not certain of which one, but at the moment, everything is okay with it. If they can also make any additions, it would be good.

Currently, it does not require any maintenance on my end.

I have no major complaint about the integration of Automation Anywhere into my workflows, APIs, and business applications. The integrations are always okay. I have no major problems. It integrates easily with our systems. It has no main challenges.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere to a new version is now easier because I've done it multiple times, so it is easy. No problem with it. It is okay.

The pricing of Automation Anywhere is, I think, not bad and a fair one. It's not so expensive, but of course, it is worth the cost. It is good pricing.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten because it's something that I really depend on. File transfers, managing my tasks, automating, managing, monitoring the event logs, that automated monitoring of all our server logins, then also detecting any problems in the process and errors, and so on.

My main use cases for Automation Anywhere include enterprise use cases in travel, banking, and supply chain. It's used for automating back-office business processes that simplify the work of day-to-day business operations.

The AI Agent Studio plays a crucial role in our automation processes as we use it to create autonomous agents, specifically back-office autonomous agents. We use it to automate processes where AI agents call the RPA bots for automation. The bots will call, and the agents will be calling the bots for the action part, while decision-making is done by AI agents. Wherever decision-making is involved, the agents take the lead. If there are pure actions to be performed, an AI agent will call an RPA bot. If there is any knowledge discovery or details to be searched, then it uses context routing or a RAG index. Finally, whatever an AI agent has done goes through a human in the loop for final verification by a human reviewer. This is a business process and AI agents are new, so we have introduced human verification for any actions done by AI agents. It goes through a human review before actually being performed in core enterprise systems such as SAP, ERP systems, booking systems, or insurance claim systems.

The main challenge or objective I was looking to solve with agentic process automation is related to tasks which cannot be purely rule-based automation, such as reading emails or going through content which is more unstructured in nature. When referring to unstructured nature, it could be contract documents, mortgage documents, reading mail messages, or chat messages. In all those areas, we cannot employ RPA bots to perform the automation because RPA bots tend to expect the data to be in a more predictable, deterministic, and more structured form or a semi-structured form.

The Autopilot capability of Automation Anywhere has been more useful in semi-autonomous processes where I need to discover information from enterprise documents, such as policy documents or more enterprise-related documents. Autopilot is particularly useful for back-office teams because it provides more reliable and precise responses compared to traditional search methods. It is useful for teams in their day-to-day processes where they have to refer to information from enterprise documents, guidelines, or fetch information from SOPs.

The AI Agent Studio compliance feature effectively meets our needs by providing a trust layer that enables us to define which LLMs to use, the level of creativity that we can allow, and creative decisions we can allow it to take. It determines what gets revealed to the model provider versus what doesn't, including whether PII and PHI data is revealed or concealed. It also supports potential tokenization of sensitive data. The guardrail modules are beneficial; if the tool doesn't return the expected response, then it raises an error, alarm, or warning. These configurable settings within APA, in the control room, are a good way to start in order to pursue use cases that we couldn't pursue earlier, which were completely manual.

AI governance is very important in my organization, and the AI Agent Studio compliance feature effectively meets these needs. APA helped achieve automation goals, but it's evolving. We have tried simple and medium use cases, and there are more complex, cumbersome use cases yet to be picked up. For now, the complex tasks that we could not pursue through RPA, we are able to do with APA.

Automation Anywhere adapts well to customers' needs. Customers are migrating or willing to pursue more complex use cases requiring AI capabilities, and their platform supports the needs for more complex implementations.

The robotic capabilities are most valuable. The different screen scraping capabilities have been in use for a long time. Their agentic capabilities and AI capabilities have brought many new advancements and features. Their Autopilot, semi-autonomous agents, and autonomous agents have added numerous new features and capabilities. I would rate them high on these features because they have innovated and kept their platform more centered and relevant in the market by introducing these AI and agentic capabilities.

Automation Anywhere is a good platform with extensive capabilities. Their roadmap is promising, especially the AI roadmap. They have good AI capabilities, autonomous agents, semi-autonomous agents, knowledge agents, RAG capabilities, and AI engineering capabilities for faster development.

Regarding improvement areas for Automation Anywhere, they already have strong AI agentic capabilities. The autonomous agents and semi-autonomous agents have decent capabilities, and I don't see any gaps with the way it's been designed. We tried creating agents, autonomous, and semi-autonomous agents with Automation Anywhere, and it is working fine. We see good capabilities and faster time to implement. It has good low-code implementation capabilities, so we are able to perform implementations faster using the agentic AI stack in Automation Anywhere. The architecture and pro-code support for pro-code agents are areas that could use improvement, which they don't have currently.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for five to six years.

Regarding stability and reliability, Automation Anywhere is good.

For automation at scale, it's a reliable platform. I can implement a large number of automations, and the platform performs well. I don't see any issues with stability or scalability; both are satisfactory. I can scale it in terms of hundreds of bots and configure hundreds of parallel robots easily.

I often communicate with the technical support of Automation Anywhere, and their technical support teams are excellent. They provide great support. Especially if you are a premium partner or a gold partner, you have a very good support option, including a partner success manager assigned to you with good SLA deadlines within which your query is resolved.

Positive

I have participated in the initial setup of Automation Anywhere as they are providing a SaaS cloud model, so the setup is quite easy now. 

In the initial setup, you don't have to invest much effort because they now have a complete AI SaaS module, and even the A360 has a SaaS module. You can subscribe to it and just have things connected. There could be some plugins or certain settings for the local studio, or another local robot which might require certain add-ons and dependency packages. But it's more of an initial effort investment; once you set things up, it works fine.

They offer both on-prem and SaaS cloud solutions, but on-prem may require more effort in setup. SaaS cloud is easier to utilize and configure. Nowadays, most customers are migrating to cloud options, which come with various benefits and ease of setup, including commitments in provisioning servers. Multiple benefits are available, and many customers, including those in the Middle East, are migrating towards cloud setups.

It's affordable because the subscription allows you to use a certain number of tokens from the LLM provider. You only pay for the tokens you actually utilize, and you won't pay more than that. This applies regardless of which service you are subscribed to, whether it's Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other provider.

I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

We implement Automation Anywhere for our customers or for our clients, but we also use it internally for our own processes too.

We're in a growth phase, so this solution helps us scale and standarize processes so we can do more with less. 

The low-code platform is pretty easy to learn, especially if you have come from a technical background. Then you can build quite a few powerful automations with it already with the traditional RPA in terms of the flexibility it gives you. 

There are additional features, such as document automation, that expand the scope in terms of what you can use it for. It's a great multi-tool. Every piece of it works really great. 

For us, the features of Automation Anywhere help us scale our automations and standardize our processes. We are able to do more with less, and that's been the key for us in terms of using the platform.

In our automation processes, we are utilizing the AI Agent Studio mostly in our training. We haven't fully rolled out any live automations yet. That's something we'll implement very soon. The integration features of Automation Anywhere are flexible in terms of what you can connect to. You can bring it over lens or use what's available, which gives a lot of flexibility in terms of how you can use the platform.

We have explored the autopilot capability of IQ Bot AI, and it's maturing. We are keeping an eye on it to determine if it can speed up the development work for us. We are definitely curious and will continue to explore as the product evolves.

We utilize Automation Anywhere's CoE Center of Excellence Manager. Its impact on visibility in the automation lifecycle is actually very important. It shows the complete lifecycle of opportunities, from what's in pipeline to what's been deployed, and how those deployments are performing in production.

In the age of agentic AI, it's allowing us to imagine what comes next.

My impression of the AI governance features in maintaining compliance and data integrity in our company so far is positive. Though we haven't rolled out anything actively yet, from what I see, it gives quite a granular level of control in terms of what can be done and how different outputs can be controlled. AI governance is very important to our company, and while the AI Agent Studio's compliance feature might not be as mature, there are security requirements around keeping our customer data safe and secure.

The availability of material in terms of more technical documentation could be improved, particularly in-depth information about how things can be done. I'm not saying it's not available at this time, but there's always scope in terms of playbooks, especially with APA coming out, as things can be done differently than traditional methods. It would be beneficial to have standardized playbooks that we can use to understand change management, position this to our leadership, and demonstrate the art of what's possible. Some playbooks of that kind, especially on the execution level, would be nice.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for about five years.

Before adopting Automation Anywhere, we haven't really used other solutions. 

What I appreciate the most about Automation Anywhere is that it's pretty flexible in terms of standing it up. You don't have to have a whole lot of infrastructure setup that's required for it.

It has not yet influenced our automation programs and we're not really tracking the level of return on investments.

My experience with the pricing, the setup costs, and the licensing of the Automation Anywhere platform is that it's pretty competitive.

We do test different solutions to see how they are in the market. They don't necessarily have with Automation Anywhere offers. 

Automation Anywhere helps us overcome operational challenges. Especially with what's been announced recently, the solution expands a lot more beyond what was typically possible so far. I'm looking forward to checking it out in practice and seeing how much we can push the platform. 

We've just started with APA, so we don't have anything rolled out yet, however, we are looking forward to actively using it.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. Within any solution, there is always room for improvement. They seem to be going through a maturity phase. The foundation is strong. 

I work in an automation Center of Excellence in health care, and I utilize it for everything and anything that is appropriate in health care. We have approximately 41,000 hours worth of automation that operates and handles tasks ranging from assisting with HR operations, such as leave of absence, to medication monitoring and much more. Our portfolio is quite expanded.

We are also jumping into the Co-Pilot world because we want to start embedding it into Teams, SailPoint, and some of the other tools. 

We are also looking at a unique use case. We have discharges, and there are certain types of prescriptions that are just extremely specialized as part of discharge. We have medication contracts. One of the things that we have going on in our organization is a buddy system and then an official request. The buddy system is essentially prescription denial appeals. We would like to use AI to search our contracts to figure out what is the standard for these medications and what are the denials and appeals that we can have prewritten and ready to go.

It was a response to COVID that prompted us to dive into scalable tools. We needed scalability and the ability to perform 10,000 or 1,000 or 200 tasks at any moment. No other software that we have had could provide such scalability and is built in a modular way.

It is unique and almost invisible. You do not realize its impact until you discuss it with users who provide positive feedback. We build automation, support it, and deploy it. When we meet with our users later, they have such good feedback about how impactful these things are to their path. For a nurse, not having to repeat a task 10,000 times has made a significant difference. Especially during COVID, it was truly helpful on the front line. Now, I also employ it with other powerful medication tools.

I was personally able to see its benefits as soon as I jumped into software. It was one of the most impactful and amazing tools for my day-to-day life because, at any point in time, I could design something, modularly build it, and deploy it. It can handle such amazing tasks, including things like templates and design and all other materials that we have for communications or activities, and produce them for me automatically. For me, personally, it made a huge impact right from the get-go, but as an organization, we definitely had to learn how to make choices on our use cases.

It has absolutely saved us time and costs. The whole point of the software is to develop something that at least on a use case basis provides value. We have many years of learning how to do our program. Over time, we have also been using it for other things, such as compliance. We have definitely evolved from just saving time or money to using this solution for everything we can use it for.

I have just built my first Co-Pilot, and it is significant in how that part functions. I am also exploring the API task tools, which appear to be quite significant, but for the most part, the forms and the capability to integrate data from other software represent the specialty.

One thing I learned with Co-Pilot is that it is very static. For instance, when dealing with tables and their headers, I must program them in a form. If my build changes, I have to return to my form and update the table titles. Features like looping are missing from Co-Pilot. If I want to perform a task five times in a row, I have to rerun Co-Pilot five times just to achieve that. This is an aspect I considered as I explored possible changes and improvements. Other than that, it is among the best software tools and organizations I have worked with. I find it challenging to suggest much beyond continuing the good work and expanding on it.

I first heard about it back in 2021. This will be my fourth year using it.

I had an issue lasting for the better part of three years, and it was quite severe. I never lodged a ticket because whenever we attempted to resolve it internally, the problem temporarily ceased. Each time I ran my Digital Colleagues, I encountered a strange error on my screen, which persisted for a couple of years. However, an update corrected it, and it is no longer an issue. 

The only current challenge involves a discrepancy in table columns. In my support session, we could not figure out why my table was off by one column. I had to have a blank column zero for my table to align correctly. These minor issues aside, the tool now functions more stably. 

Previously, inconsistent search behavior occurred in the ServiceNow search bar. It was puzzling because it worked differently every single time that we searched in that search bar, but that issue has been resolved.

Scalability is the most remarkable feature of this tool for me. For example, we have a recognition system for automation. I designed a template for various achievements by citizen developers, such as completing a class or build. At first, it was not a big deal to just do it yourself because you are only doing a handful of templates, but the last round had 34. Initially, creating a few templates was manageable. With time, however, it escalated from 5 templates to 34. We are now using this tool multiple times weekly for template generation. Eventually, I aim to release it to the entire automation team so that leaders can readily recognize achievements based on team activities. 

Scalability is impressive; whether handling five or a hundred million templates, it remains easy to design and build. The tool's intuitive nature contrasts with other tools, which are less intuitive for building and scaling, explaining my infrequent use of them.

I have contacted their support for technical issues with the software as well as personal build support.

The response is very quick. Within a couple of days, they are communicating and establishing connections to set up solutions. In my case, I meet with my customer relations every Friday. We get prompt responses to any issues I raise. The support is fantastic, even when dealing with complex situations due to the complexity of some of my builds. While not all problems are solved immediately, this is typical for complex tasks.

I very recently had one of the best support help sessions that anyone could have ever asked for. We were doing something really complex in Co-Pilot, and it was something that was completely unique to even our internal development team. They helped me solve that, and they did it in such a great way. It was a ten out of ten for connecting to someone, taking the time, and doing all of the work. However, we have also had some support tickets in the past that have been just okay. It has been a mixed bag on that front. I would rate them an eight out of ten because they do try hard to connect and support us even though we are doing some complex work.

Positive

This predates my time, so I am not fully sure. I do know Microsoft automations were used before transitioning to Automation Anywhere. Selecting a vendor was a part of the process when we started the program, and Automation Anywhere was chosen.

The decision for the software had already been made. I was only involved in meetings to discuss how we were going to deploy programs, design things, and create standards. 

I believe it took six months from deciding to go live with the software to deploying automations. It did not exceed six months to get everything up and running, though there might have been a year of planning. Once I was set for launch with everything in place, the transition from purchased to used tenants happened swiftly, possibly in less than six months.

Initially, I used strategic resourcing for implementation. At the time, I had an engineer, a technical lead, a technical developer, and an architect—four individuals in total—who implemented all my environments. Four environments were set up, following designs, standards, and rules. This setup involved comprehensive program design, focusing on transitioning and using different control rooms and establishing standards.

We support the entire tool, and we support the automations which require lots of maintenance and support. That is only due to user design or systems changes or some of the elements that are out there. We have a whole support program that goes along with our automations. As for the tool itself, it is just like any other software tool. It is certainly more stable than something like Microsoft where you constantly have to go back and correct issues or incidents. Our incidents are with bots, not with the software.

My job involves citizen development. I work in the field of helping people connect to this technology and use it. In terms of ease of use, the software is not hard to use, but things are presented to users in a new way than what they are used to. I had to make people start with basic programs and learn how to do a simple process. It is a little bit of an advanced tool. It is easy to understand for me and I love it, but it is definitely a step above entry. Before I instituted an entry course, the learning curve was a little bit steeper. We would have individuals coming to our four-day course and then come through and do lots of support. When we taught them the basics of how the automation software works and then brought them into this advanced tool, it was very quick for them. Our results were much better, and we have those individuals building regularly.

In terms of integration, what was interesting to learn was that everything requires a configuration. For an organization like ours, it involved figuring out how we should branch, how we should grow, and how we should engage other teams to get those configurations implemented so that packages will work as intended. That was an interesting learning curve for us. We had to adjust how we train, talk about packages, and use the software to make sure that we had the right integrations and setups. A great example is ServiceNow. They have the packages for ServiceNow built in. If you have all the access to the information and all the things you need, you are in good shape to have some really awesome automation. If one of those pieces is not in place, you have to think a little bit about how you are going to access that.

Automation Anywhere is a ten out of ten. The company is impressive, especially with its new initiatives like Agentic AI. In five years, it is going to be amazing to witness their advancements, particularly as AI continues to play a significant role.

I have been using Automation Anywhere to automate repetitive tasks across various domains and organizations. We have developed a lot of automations in domains like finance, HR, and supply chains on a daily basis. Basically, we create bots using Automation Anywhere that replicate human actions. 

Currently, we are working on a business case involving agents who respond to phone calls, providing order dispatch status. The average call time is five to six minutes. By using AI, we are creating a chatbot so that a customer service agent can input details and quickly provide all the customer-related information. This reduces call times from five minutes to one or two minutes, which is something we are currently working on. We are also exploring AI use cases for things that are not structured or rule-based.

Previously, we were using legacy automation methods. We were using different platforms to automate the system by writing scripts. You get the best value from automation when you automate a process end to end. In a business process, multiple applications might be involved in completing the processes. Automation Anywhere provides better integration with applications. We can integrate multiple applications at the frontend or backend and complete our processes. Previously, we could automate only a few parts because of limitations in supporting various technologies, whereas Automation Anywhere helps to integrate all the applications and automate a process end to end.

I have integrated it with SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Jira, Tableau, and a lot of Microsoft platforms. We have also had integrations with database and mainframe applications. The integration is seamless. They have packages for particular applications. If you want to work with Salesforce, they already have a package for Salesforce. You just have to connect Salesforce with a certain set of details and provide the API details. It is seamless and within a second, you get connected, and data starts to be exchanged with the application.

It saves headcounts, improves customer experiences, and provides time and cost savings. In some projects, millions of dollars are saved annually from a single bot. The response time for certain customer scenarios has also been made efficient.

The way it integrates with subsystems is impressive. When automating business processes, there might be multiple systems in use. Automation Anywhere provides various ways to connect, such as by directly using backend APIs or using the frontend. This is incredibly useful.

They are constantly enhancing its capabilities. They have already included support for GenAI, enabling easy LLM training. You can train LLMs without putting in a lot of effort. You can train a model very easily. If you do the same thing manually from scratch, it will take a lot of time and you also cannot be sure of the accuracy. They are enhancing their capabilities in the field of AI to provide efficiency and accuracy.

It is a low-code/no-code platform. If you have a little bit of technical knowledge, you can easily design a bot. It is a basic part of software development. It is easier if you are aware of a few things such as writing up a logic, loop conditions, etc. Someone having the basic knowledge can easily adapt to this tool. It is quite simple and straightforward with drag-and-drop actions. It also provides information about a particular package or action you are going to use in your automation. If you are not familiar with the technology, you can explore Automation Anywhere University where they provide training. For anyone eager to start with it, it is quite easy.

Automation tools have a lot of dependency on the environment, particularly on machines. Reducing this dependency could increase success. The product has entered the GenAI space, so it is easy to implement. It will keep improving over time. However, making the product more lightweight by reducing its dependency on infrastructure could greatly help in the long run.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the last six years.

The stability rating is a nine out of ten. They are improving stability daily. If you had asked me four or five years ago, I would have rated it four or five, but they have significantly improved. Currently, nine is accurate, but there is always room for improvement.

It is being used globally. We are a global team with a presence in six to seven different countries. We have about 10,000 employees. We have business processes in different countries, and everyone is using it. We have implemented 140 to 150 automations, and a lot of people are involved in developing them.

I would rate it an eight out of ten for scalability.

I would rate them a nine out of ten. They have been kind and supportive. Whenever we need help, we can reach out to them, and they help us out.

Positive

I have worked with major partners like UiPath and Blue Prism prior to Automation Anywhere. I also worked with UiPath last year.

When comparing them from a developer's perspective, I prefer Automation Anywhere. Its canvas is user-friendly with options to switch between code view and list view, which other tools lack. As a developer comfortable with list view coding, transitioning to UiPath without that feature would require adaptation, whereas transitioning from UiPath to Automation Anywhere is smooth due to the flow view or list view option. Automation Anywhere already provides flow view development, simplifying adaptation. I appreciate this flexibility. I am also working on Power Automate, which is generally flow-based. Automation Anywhere offers convenient switching.

In UiPath, if you want to work with Salesforce, the package will not be there by default. You have to import that package, which is not the case with Automation Anywhere. Importing packages, like for Salesforce, is straightforward, and often available to team members. The best feature is having access to packages imported by team members.

It is straightforward. 

When it comes to bot deployment, a bot takes two minutes from one environment to another. Moving code between environments also takes only two minutes. However, there are sanity checks. These checks apply to all tools used in automation. Deploying code takes two minutes. We have automated this process, allowing code transfer from test to production with a single approval click. It is seamless.

Bot maintenance is not a tedious task. Once an update is done, we push that into a test or development to check whether it is impacting our automation. In more than 90% of scenarios, it does not impact. In a few cases, there is some impact with the update.

Before automating a use case, we assess its impact in terms of efficiency, error reduction, and cost savings.

Automation Anywhere has helped achieve around 50% savings in some scenarios. The error rate has been reduced by 80% to 90% in processes. Errors have been successfully eliminated from the process.

In terms of cost, we participated in projects achieving two to three million dollars in annual savings.

If you are a non-technical person, you need to become familiar with basic programming concepts such as conditions, looping, etc. Automation Anywhere is easy to adapt to. The UI is simple. If someone is coming from a different technology and wants to develop something in Automation Anywhere, one or two weeks are enough to get started with it.

We are getting trained on AI, document automation, and the Copilot system at the organization level. We are also exploring a few other business cases for implementing GenAI. We have some unstructured handwritten documents, and we are trying to assess how efficient it would be to automate it and how easily we can create a model for a certain set of documents for extracting the details.

I would surely recommend Automation Anywhere to other users. For business professionals, it automates repetitive tasks and enhances efficiency and cost savings. For technical individuals, it is easy to use and adapt. 

I would rate Automation Anywhere a nine out of ten.

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.