Wave 0: Manual

A large share of the work in most organisations is still done by hand. Someone exports a report, pastes it into a spreadsheet, checks it against another system and emails the result. Each step is simple. Together they take hours, and the hours grow with the volume.

Robotic process automation was the first answer. A script records the clicks and keystrokes a person makes and repeats them, faster and through the night. For a fixed process on stable screens it works: the same reconciliation, the same form, the same file moved from one place to another.

What a script takes off people’s hands is repetition. What it leaves with them is judgement. A bot follows the path it was given. When an invoice arrives in a new layout, a rule changes or a field moves on a screen, it stops, and a person picks the work back up.

So the first step is worth taking for the right work: high volume, few exceptions, systems that rarely change. It is a poor fit for work that needs reading, weighing or deciding, which is most of the work that costs real time.

The question to carry into the next wave is not how many bots to build, but who looks after them. Each bot is a small piece of software that someone has to build, watch and repair. That cost is where the second wave starts to show its limits.