The Top Three Automation Predictions For 2025

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Despite obvious benefits and enthusiasm, these implementation challenges will hinder 2025 gains. Out of all the AI agent discussion, businesses will find only moderate success, mostly in less critical employee support applications. GenAI’s ability to create autonomous, unstructured workflow patterns and adapt to the dynamic nature of real-world processes will have to wait. David DeBari, technical team leader for ExxonMobil’s Open Process Automation (OPA) program, took the stage at the YNOW2024 conference with good news to share. “We’ve gone from asking if this could work to saying we can now do open process automation,” he told the audience.

John Robins is director and head of AI & Data and Industrial Business at Synapse, part of Capgemini Invent. As a product management and business growth executive with over 18 years’ experience, John specializes in bridging the physical and digital worlds. In his current role, John works with ambitious clients to build novel deep-tech products leveraging IoT and AI technologies across industrial, hi-tech, automotive, telco and food/agtech markets. Previously, John led product management at a large consumer electronics company and ran an industrial IoT startup. Additionally, he is a member of the TinyML Working Group and a Gartner Product Management Ambassador.

Coopetition key to our sustainable survival

This way, we can route tasks more intelligently and address exceptions as they come up, instead of waiting for them to reach a human in the loop. One of the top RPA software, UiPath, has demonstrated a commitment to regular updates. UiPath releases updates every two months, ensuring that users have access to the latest features and improvements.

Thus, even if users are trained, some technologies might still be difficult to use (for example, due to noninclusive designs), leading to either limited adoption or, again, insecure shortcuts. Furthermore, training all users to become security experts is not always economically justified given the ever-changing nature of new threats. Humans, especially in their role as end users in organizations, have long been considered the weakest link—even enemies—in cybersecurity. This image stems from the perception that, essentially, it is the users who behave insecurely by creating weak passwords, clicking on phishing links, or providing data in insecure networks.

• To conclude, constraining approaches can be beneficial and even necessary in some cases; for example, automation is needed to match attackers’ efforts, which are also often built on automation.
• Perplexity Spaces vs Custom GPTs—two standout platforms—each cater to different aspects of AI functionality.
• If you’re growing a small business, there will come a time to hire a bigger team if you want to scale.
• Instead of storing passwords within our bots, we rely on our password management system to ensure that access remains tightly controlled.
• UiPath is suitable for businesses of all sizes and industries and offers both attended and unattended automation options.
• However, UiPath has a dedicated SAP automation solution that makes it a preferred choice for SAP integration.

Generative AI (genAI) and edge intelligence will drive robotics projects that will combine cognitive and physical automation, for example. Citizen developers will start to build genAI-infused automation apps, leveraging their domain expertise. However, there are significant infrastructure challenges that are holding back businesses from gaining a competitive advantage, bringing disruptions to the market and leapfrogging their market capitalization. There certainly are challenges around agentic AI like data security, ethics and biases and explainability.

Industry Applications

He pointed to ExxonMobil’s live plant using OPA technology in Baton Rouge, La., in which the company is cutting loops over from the plant’s legacy system to the OPA system. While running both systems currently, ExxonMobil expects to be running fully on the OPA system before the end of the year. Top-performing scientists appear to be using AI not to replicate known methods but to take creative risks, formulating ChatGPT App and testing ideas that might otherwise remain theoretical. This willingness to experiment, to “fail forward” as part of the discovery process, is a hallmark of creativity and is often what separates true innovators from the rest. By utilizing AI creatively, these scientists amplify their own potential, making breakthroughs that reflect both human insight and the computational power of AI.

This is particularly important for businesses that are growing or have fluctuating workloads. RPA technology is designed to mimic human actions, which means that it can perform tasks with greater accuracy and speed than humans. It also frees up human employees to focus on more complex and strategic tasks, which can increase productivity and improve job satisfaction. The coming year promises to be a dynamic period for automation, characterized by growing enthusiasm and activity surrounding agentic and AI-driven operations. 2025 will serve as a crucial stepping stone to prepare for integration of physical robots, digital systems, and human endpoints.

Perplexity Spaces excels with its advanced search capabilities and capacity to handle large volumes of data, making it ideal for research-focused tasks. Conversely, Custom GPTs provide a framework for automation and integration, enabling bespoke solutions tailored to individual needs. To gain more insight into their unique benefits and features, check out the comparison video below by Mark Kashef. As powerful as current use cases like image analysis and predictive maintenance are, Physical AI’s potential to transform industries and address major global challenges is much greater than the solutions we have today. Just as organizations are racing to adopt LLM AI tools to build interactive, natural interfaces, it’s wise for organizations to start thinking now about how Physical AI can add value or solve problems. The key, as with any new technology, is to start small and plan methodically, with a problem statement, a data-informed product-market fit and a plan to develop or source the talent needed to make the product or solution a reality.

These tools have been recognized for their comprehensive features, scalability, and ease of use. Every decision you make—from what to eat for breakfast to how you’re going to market a new program—drains some of that power. Download our complimentary Predictions guide, which covers more of our top technology and security predictions for 2025. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. Solving these challenges is a huge opportunity over the next few years, but the future for agentic AI systems is now.

These changes, when thoughtfully implemented, can transform workflows and position organizations to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape that will need to adapt faster than ever. Our goal is to reduce the need for account managers to know about the specifics of each automation. By giving them pre-built prompts, they can gain efficiencies and focus on the customer.

These telemetry pipelines are responsible for data integration, data ingestion, data aggregation and transformation and data enrichment and routing to create the knowledge graph used by GraphRAG. Leveraging agentic AI agents to achieve these phases with conversational prompts would automate DevSecOps and ITOps processes entirely by creating workflows. It’s no secret that as a result of the AI revolution, we’re seeing enterprises, both small and large, aspire to be autonomous with augmented intelligence. The advent of generative AI (GenAI) and LLMs has been a transformative step to get closer to this vision. Collectively, AI, GenAI and agentic AI are poised to be one of the most disruptive technological transformations of our time. The disruption will likely be comparable to, or even exceed, the impact of previous technological revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution or the rise of the Internet.

This piece aims to present a brief overview of the top 5 leading robotic process automation software anticipated for 2023. One of the top RPA software solutions in 2023, according to various sources, is UiPath. UiPath offers a comprehensive support system that includes a knowledge base, community forum, and customer support portal. The UiPath Community Forum is a particularly active and helpful resource for users looking to connect with other RPA professionals and share best practices. In the retail industry, RPA is being used to automate tasks such as inventory management, order processing, and customer service.

This year, they released version 2.1 of the standard, which DeBari said created an open architecture from which they could build systems. He was also quick to point out that the technologies involved in open process automation aren’t new, but many are well proven within the IT realm. He and his colleagues believe many of those software technologies can be brought into the OT world.

Based on the insights of empirical research, implications should then be derived in the form of frameworks, guidelines, interventions, and technical security solutions. In the following, we showcase examples of constraining and considering approaches and reflect on their implications in terms of related questions, applied solutions, and their outcomes. We then make the argument for adding a third category of measures, enabling approaches, that treat humans as a resource and a partner in security efforts (Figure 1). This switch in perspective opens pathways to new solutions for supporting secure human behavior and decision making. We therefore call for evidence-based research studying human motivation and behavior that contributes to security, and for developing and testing the resulting measures. A more holistic view achieved through the careful selection and combination of approaches can address some of the challenges we currently face in cybersecurity.

By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer. “We want to take automation from closed and propriety to open and standards based, because we need innovation. We need to be able to do the technology insertion at any time, because we are being asked every ChatGPT day for value creation,” DeBari said. On one hand,

generative AI can enhance the skills of millions of specialists,

making them more productive, creative, informative, efficient, and

intelligent. On the other hand, employers may choose to automate

some or even all of their managers’ jobs, potentially leading to

job losses and a decreased demand for previously sought-after

skills.

One of the most important features to evaluate when choosing an RPA software is its ease of use. The software should have an intuitive interface that is easy to navigate and understand. It should also be easy to set up and configure, with clear instructions and documentation. Nicole Byers, Ph.D., is a psychologist with expertise in clinical psychology and neuropsychology located in Calgary, Canada, where she’s the founder of Rocky Mountain Neurosciences. I delegate to technology as much as possible to save brain power—and it doesn’t have to be fancy AI. Automation can even mean a bit of preplanning so you have less to think about when you get to your desk.

Scientists who demonstrated creative approaches to AI-assisted research were far more likely to produce transformative, rather than incremental, innovations. Incremental improvements—those that optimize or refine existing ideas—are valuable, but they don’t redefine the field. Transformative innovations, however, are those that open new avenues of research and redefine what is possible. Simpson’s vision and enthusiasm for UiPath’s ‘second act’ underscores a crucial aspect of the evolving automation landscape — the need to not just connecting processes seamlessly, but to join up those automations across the enterprise.

Agentic AI Makes Autonomous Enterprises A Reality

However, they may require more technical expertise to set up and use compared to commercial RPA software. Blue Prism is another RPA software that places a strong emphasis on software updates and longevity. The company releases regular updates to ensure compatibility with the latest technologies and offers long-term support for its products. Additionally, Blue Prism offers a range of training and certification programs to help ensure users are equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to make the most of the software.

It is time to reconsider how we deal with the human factor in cybersecurity and explore new avenues for research. Security is neither a product nor mere technology, but it requires the integration of people, processes, and technology.5 As such, we need to consider the interaction of humans and security technologies within complex sociotechnical systems. If we truly want to understand and improve security behavior, it is essential that we also incorporate insights from disciplines primarily concerned with the “people” and “process” aspects, such as the human sciences and safety science. CyberArk is a leading RPA software solution that offers advanced security features to protect the organization’s sensitive data. It provides end-to-end security for RPA processes, including secure credential management, privileged access management, and secure remote access. CyberArk also offers compliance reporting and auditing capabilities to ensure that the organization meets regulatory requirements.

Blue Prism is a powerful RPA software that is designed to handle complex business processes. Blue Prism’s drag-and-drop interface and extensive library of pre-built bots make it easy to create and deploy automation solutions quickly. In all the exciting discussions of AI over the past year, the physical world has been largely overlooked. The conversations around chatbots and other tools enabled by large language models (LLMs) focus primarily on digital applications and little on the physical challenges that AI can address.

Automation Anywhere offers a range of support options, including a knowledge base, support portal, and community forum. The Automation Anywhere Community Forum is a vibrant community of RPA practitioners who share tips, tricks, and solutions to common problems. When considering the cost of RPA software, it is important to also factor in the cost of implementation and maintenance.

• UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism are the current market leaders in the RPA industry.
• Instead, today they’re a lot more about advanced control because of the benefits versus, say, a simple cascaded loop model.
• On the other hand, employers may choose to automate

  some or even all of their managers’ jobs, potentially leading to

  job losses and a decreased demand for previously sought-after

  skills.

• These acknowledge that today’s sociotechnical systems are highly complex and interconnected and that a combination of factors contribute to error but also to success.
• RPA can also be used to monitor transactions in real-time, flagging any suspicious activity and reducing the risk of fraud.

The free version is suitable for small businesses or individuals who want to experiment with RPA. The paid version, on the other hand, is more comprehensive and can scale to meet the needs of large enterprises. However, the cognitive process automation cost of the paid version can vary depending on the number of licenses required. This includes identifying the resources needed for the implementation, developing a timeline, and assigning responsibilities to team members.