Automation Anywhere to hire 2000 Engineers
Company hopes to have a headcount of 3000 humans and 300 bots by 2019
Automation Anywhere, a platform provider for Robotic Process Automation (RPA), plans to increase its global headcount to 3000 employees by 2019 from its current headcount of around 1000. The company will also proportionally increase the number of bots deployed for its own processes from 100 to 300. Most of these new positions are expected to be created in India.
“India has the skill of running the processes of the world, the tech expertise and the people. If I need to hire 2000 people, where are they? They are all here,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO, Automation Anywhere. “We have software engineers and cognitive engineers in three large development centres: two in India and one in San Jose in the US.”
“Today there are more high paying jobs in the world than ever before. India has an opportunity to become automation capital of the world. The number of jobs will significantly increase,” said Shukla.
Current estimates put the market size for bots at around $ 2.9 billion. However, these estimates, undergo regular upward revisions considering the nascency of the whole sector.
“The potential of the market is much much higher. Presently, digital music is a $ 40 billion market, digital advertising is at $ 500 billion while manual labor involved in data collection and processing is $ 10 trillion across the world. At this point the market is double the size of digital advertising. In next 20–30 years half of that will be automated. Then the cost will come down to one trillion due to the efficiencies created by bots. The market will expand back and the usage will go up multifold taking the market up to $ 5 trillion in due course,” said Mihir Shukla, citing statistics from a McKinsey report. “When you make things more efficient and automate it, it expands the market. There is a potential of changing the definition of work itself.”
“With computing costs coming down, the cost of a bot will continue to reduce every year. So the total cost of ownership of a bot is getting lower every year while the cost of a person is getting higher every year and a bot runs 24/7,” he added.
With the increasing number of millennials joining the workforce, recruiting is becoming a challenge for traditional businesses. “What we think of as a disruption, is a norm for the next generation today,” said Shukla.
“There are more jobs open today than the number of people available to work. This is because of the skill gap; there is no job problem,” said Ankur Kothari, Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer, Automation Anywhere. “Over the last 20–30 years we have become a little bit robotic. We do repetitive things without realising. Human skill sets should focus on empathising and not entering into six systems in the fastest possible way,” he added.
To illustrate this point : In a traditional insurance company around 1500 people in the talent funnel would be deployed in processing unstructured documents, another 300 to make sense of the claim and then there are 100 underwriters. The whole process could take around three weeks. The same work could be achieved in three seconds by using the comapny’s IQ-Bot to processes the vast amount of unstructured documents. It would then make a call to Watson to do the rest. Digital native companies have created a new standard of customer experience.
“Like many of us know Excel and Powerpoint today, we will learn to build bots. We have a build-a-bot programme, where you can create a bot in 50 minutes,” said Shukla. He said that Phil Fersht’s 7 year old son was able to create a bot. [Phil Fersht is the Founder and CEO of HFS Research]
The company has training partners worldwide to help develop the skills needed. “We are working with 68 universities and colleges and in the process of talking to another 140 of them world wide,” he added.
The company had commissioned a research study by Goldsmiths, University of London. According to the study “The Augmented Human Enterprise”, India is driving RPA adoption worldwide, with 71% of Indian respondents stating that their employees used RPA and AI-based technologies.
“Digital technology’s nascent autonomy promises an evolutionary leap in our capacity to grow as human beings,” said Dr. Chris Brauer, Director of Innovation in the Institute of Management Studies (IMS) at Goldsmiths, University of London. “While the hyped potential of AI generates endless headlines, technologies such as RPA are quietly being rolled out in many of the most productive companies around the world — humans and bots are already working alongside each other across the globe and in every sector. Where businesses are getting it right, the best of our human capabilities are being augmented by technology to create innovation previously unimagined. But in these early days, not everyone is getting it right.”
In July this year, Automation Anywhere completed its Series A financing round of $250 million led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Goldman Sachs Growth Equity with participation from General Atlantic and World Innovation Lab (WiL). This was one of the largest Series A rounds on record for an enterprise software company and took its post-money valuation to $1.8 billion. With this investment, Automation Anywhere is deepening its customer engagements in North America, LATAM, India, Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore (ASEAN), and plans to deploy its technology in additional geographies.
Earlier this month, the company announced the opening of nine new locations in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Miami, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, Toronto, Warsaw and Washington, D.C. These new locations bring the total number of global offices to 19, including four others in the United States, three in India, and locations in London, Melbourne, and Singapore.
Automation Anywhere has a partnership with four cloud vendors — Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM.
The company’s Intelligent Digital Workforce Platform has been deployed by around 1,100 customers around the world. The solution is a convergence of RPA, cognitive, and embedded analytic capabilities.
