Consolidation will Occur rapidly in The Future of RPA

RPA or robotic process automation is a growing new trend. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) first emerged in early 2000s with UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere releasing their products and libraries around 2003.

Salesforce recently acquired Servicetrace to integrate it with Mulesoft. With UiPath’s successful IPO the future of RPA is being accelerated by the economic recovery from the pandemic.

We’ve seen a lot of trend lines moving throughout 2020 and into 2021 around automation, workflow, robotic process automation (RPA) and the movement to low-code and no-code application building, reports TechCrunch.

Goldman Sachs has backed Automation Anywhere, as the age of automation is fastly approaching. More CIOS are turning to robotic process automation to eliminate tedious tasks, freeing corporate workers to focus on higher value work. Administration, marketing and HR seem especially prone to automation in the coming years.

The demand for automation is growing quickly and dozens of RPA companies are expanding their scope. UiPath now has a market cap of over $30 billion. Additionally, technology has developed enough so that bots can now take over simple tasks from humans. Sprawling technology platforms can acquire these RPA startups and turn them into automation software that’s profitable and will rapidly consolidate the entire sector in a winner-takes-all capitalism of corporate BigTech dominance.

While RPA firms aspire for dominance, exits await Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, UiPath, WorkFusion and a gallery of other RPA companies. UIPath back in 2020 said it automated millions of tasks for over 65% of the Fortune 500. Among its 6,300 customers are Google, Amazon and NASA. Its valuation tripled between 2020 and 2021 from $10 billion to over $30 billion.

RPA and BNPL are perfect examples of how American consolidation of technology will lead to a corporate dystopia of automation and a labor pool that will bleed workers. Already there are more jobs open than their are people looking for a job in mid 2021. According to CNBC, there are 8.6 million people considered out of work in the U.S. and nearly 10 million job openings.

Technological consolidation will likely create a gap between labor demand and worker shortages that could stunt the global GDP. This isn’t hard to understand, automation will spur talent wars where only the richest firms win the best talent pool further acceleration corporate wealth inequality and fair market competition in American capitalism.

Technological consolidation could be very dangerous for the future integrity of fair and free market capitalism. To assume that when a few BigTech companies make up 26% of the S&P we have anything approaching a “free” market capitalism is absurd. Consolidation only benefits the deepest pockets among us, greed is good leads to the failure of capitalism as a few corporations are allowed to become too big.

That’s not to say Salesforce doesn’t deserve a chance to fight against the encroachment of Microsoft into its businesses. RPA can certainly help Salesforce, but does it actually have a chance to compete in the long-run? ServiceNow is acquiring Indian Intellibot.

That acquisition is part of a broader strategy by the company to move into full-scale workflow and automation. ServiceNow and Salesforce thus join UiPath and Automation anywhere as RPA consolidation contestants in an automation battle to the death of the future of RPA.