Exploring the Evolution of Automation: Introducing Agentic Process Automation

In the ever-evolving landscape of automation, we frequently encounter new buzzwords and terms like Robotic ProcesAutomatio, Intelligent Automation, Hyper-Automation, Quantum Automation, and most recently, Agentic Process Automation (APA) has arrived on the scene.

As these concepts grow more complex with advancements in proces optimisation, sticking to the KISS (Keep it Short and Simple) principle is essential for understanding and applying them effectively.

Agentic Process Automation (APA) is an open ecosystem of autonomous agents that perform tasks using reusable components and machine learning, enhancing their decision-making capabilities. Unlike traditional automation, APA mimics human teams, making it crucial to onboard, train, assign roles, and eventually retire these agents—just like employees.

To put things in perspective….

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What did we learn in 2024?

At this year’s annual end-of-year collab meeting in Hamburg, we took a closer look at what we have learned in 2024 by bringing together our local groups with an open invite to other community members, a few selected speakers and created a curated packed afternoon with a dozen lightning talks.

Attending this year was a bigger crowd than past years — a diverse set of digital leaders from large, complex and global organisations like Canyon, Jungheinrich, Lufthansa, OTTO alongside agencies such as Diconium and Thoughtworks as well as software firms like CoreMedia, Magnolia, Staffbase and a few other friends from near and far.

Employee communication platform software firm Haiilo hosted us in their charming offices, which was a fitting scene for learning and networking.

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From automation-first towards value-first

When you say business automation, it’s a topic that’s been heavily influenced by vendor marketing and where the vendors have been setting the agenda. That’s not unusual for emerging tech, but given the substantial investments in automation, it’s about time to think more about value, and perhaps a bit less about the ever changing tech.

For our local chapters focused on Business Automation, this quarter was really focused on thinking less automation-first and more value-first.

While the specifics of our conversations in the group meetings is confidential, this post is written in the spirit of sharing and summarises some of the bigger topics happening.

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How to avoid RPA vendor lock-in

The exponential rate at which the technology is evolving, with new features and components being developed and released daily it’s very import that we have an open, scalable and agile architecture. However this is an ideal state and to tarnish the ideal state one of the biggest challenges today is vendor lock-in.

Often organisations don’t even realized they are locked in until the time they try and innovate with new components and try to open the existing architecture on a system, platform, tool or service.

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Hyperautomation: More hype than hyper

The first and foremost question which comes to mind is: What is hyperautomation?

According to industry analyst firm Gartner:

“Hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms, including: artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, event-driven software architecture, robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM) and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), low-code/no-code tools, packaged software, and other types of decision, process and task automation tools.”

Now from the above definition from Gartner is very clear but at the same time it’s complex, it’s integrated, interdependent but mutually exclusive and independent at the same time. Which adds to more confusions, queries, fears, complex terminologies and eventually results in procrastination, lack of confidence and finally failures.

If there is any organisation which comes forward and say that we have attained hyperautomation or we are a hyperautomation organisation, I would humbly say either they are not sure or not aware what they are doing or they are definitely on the wrong path.

In my view, hyperautomation is not a state or a milestone or a title. It’s a journey. A journey that continues as we mature, as new technologies arrive and also when Gartner’s definition of hyperautomation changes, as it will in the foreseeable future.

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Lean RPA the what, why and how

Lean has been the need of the hour as more and more organisations are adopting robotics process automation (RPA) and maturing in their respective space.

By Lean RPA we mean, optimal utilization of all available resources whether they are licenses or VDI/VM or application maintenance teams or monitoring resources and visualization tools. Eventually the expectations is less of operating cost, resilient setup, lower response time, transparency and governance.

While many organisations have historically spent quite some time developing internal resources which can help them attaining Lean RPA for long some major players in the market have gone ahead and provided COTS (Commercial Of The Shelf) solutions which can be easily adopted and deployed for enhancing operations and helping in driving efficient and effective Lean Operations.

The next question comes is what does these tools have to offer in general, now some have them out of the box and some are in the process of enhancing these tools in their current and future version upgrades and roadmaps.

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