The ability of an organization to transform the business operations in a more productive way is attracting innovations like RPA to join the force. Recently, at the Ignite conference, the tech giant Microsoft announced an offshoot of its Power Platform – Power Automate. Power Automate includes business intelligence capabilities, low code and workflow management. The tool consists of more than 275 pre built connectors for apps and services with deep integrations with Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure.

Many experts have noted the significant relationship between the rise and growth of RPA, low-code, and Microsoft's move. The Power Automate platform will target common and urgent problems of enterprises – accelerating demand to digitize business and drive innovation, an increasing shortage of developers, and the huge impression of existing legacy systems as a hindrance in the innovation journey.

Some of the significant features of Power Automate are:

•  Enhance productivity by automating business processes across an entire organization.
•  Helps organizations save time and effort while enabling anyone to automate manual business processes across all their on-premises and cloud apps and services.
•  Increases efficiency and accuracy while training bots to accurately handle repetitive manual tasks so organizations' workforce can get more done and focus on strategic, high-value contributions.
•  Simplify business process automation in order to create automated workflows with step-by-step guidance and an intuitive, no-code interface anyone can use, regardless of their technical expertise.
•  Run and manage scripts in a centralized environment to enable end-to-end automation protected by Microsoft security technology.
•  Easily train AI models (with no coding required) to manage invoice and forms processing, binary classification, object detection, and text classification using the AI Builder feature of Power Automate.

The RPA feature of Microsoft's tool turns manual tasks into automated workflows by recording and playing back human-driven interaction with software systems that don't support API automation. The company claims that it now has an end-to-end automation platform that is capable of reinventing business processes for a wide range of workloads across industries.

Microsoft and RPA Market

•  Microsoft will benefit from engaging with the market and learning more about customers' needs in this category.
•  Microsoft's "free" RPA offering will allow it to disrupt the competition a bit, creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) among enterprises currently considering large investments in more mature products, slowing sales cycles and shrinking deal sizes.
•  Microsoft's entry into the RPA market implies the importance of technology and its contribution to organizations to more closely examine their adoption strategy.

Experts Opinion

According to Bill Galusha, who is the leader for product strategy for RPA and content intelligence for ABBYY, "The features announced are really table stake-type features you would expect where business users automate tasks by recording human interactions with an application. Still, there are a lot more sophisticated capabilities that RPA vendors have today that focus on making orchestrating hundreds of these robots in production enterprise-ready."

PR Krishnan, Executive Vice President & Global Head of Enterprise Intelligent Automation & Artificial Intelligence at Tata Consultancy Services said, "We see RPA as a step in the journey towards intelligent automation. Intelligent automation is where enterprises truly benefit from connectivity, data, talent, and capabilities across a business ecosystem that transcends functional, organizational and even industry boundaries."