Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)

My use case for Automation Anywhere  is primarily focused on SAP monitoring and making some business activity changes within SAP business activities.

If I compare Automation Anywhere  and SAP ERP , my opinion based on my experience is that it is very specific to use cases. My use cases are very specific to SAP because I work in an SAP environment. SAP ERP  is a better solution for me considering my use cases are more aligned with SAP. However, if you consider the broader market, there are multiple aspects where Automation Anywhere can be better than SAP ERP, considering its use cases for non-SAP systems.

Specifically, the development studio is very useful for me in Automation Anywhere. The second thing is the deployment, which makes it easy for deploying and using the automation with the availability of the platform.

The main benefits Automation Anywhere provides for me divide into multiple aspects. If we are talking about taking the requirement and all, there are some pre-built solutions available from the marketplace which you can use. The understanding of the tool and utilizing it for the purpose allows you to use the template directly and build your own solution. The execution or the orchestration part of it is very good. All these aspects come together when considering the benefits of the tools.

For the challenges with Automation Anywhere, I will give some examples. SAP IRPA directly has connectivity, but if I need to build the same board from Automation Anywhere, the connectivity will come as an extra additional task to be done with drivers and connections. Although Automation Anywhere has the capability to automate those things, you need to go that extra mile to cope with that for developing that automation and connecting those systems. Since it is not an in-house solution for ERP systems or CRM  systems, automating those things requires additional effort. The automation can be done, but it is not directly connected. You have to build an extra connection for that. Considering those aspects, those are the difficulties I could identify, but it is not a showstopper.

Direct plugins to connect to multiple systems, if those can be added into it, would be an improvement. There are multiple ready-built plugins available, but there are still some loose points where I need to bring certain things. I do not know whether it has been added in the last seven months, but till the time I was using it, it was not there. If AI solutions such as Copilot or OpenAI solutions can be readily plugged into Automation Anywhere to build a code around it, then it will help. Those improvements can be added to the tool.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for six years.

For stability, I could give it a nine out of ten. The plugins require that extra mile, and sometimes they might get broken considering that the solution might get broken in between.

I would give Automation Anywhere a ten out of ten for scalability and the ability to expand.

Regarding technical support for Automation Anywhere, I could give it a ten out of ten. I have not reached out to the support group at all. The tool itself is self-sufficient to fix all the things.

I was using GitHub  Copilot for that, so I did not use or our organization itself was not using Automation Anywhere Copilot. The integration is with GitHub , which is why we are using a different tool.

The initial setup process for Automation Anywhere is very simple.

We do have a separate team for maintenance for Automation Anywhere. I am the only developer. There are altogether different teams who do the maintenance, the orchestration, and monitoring of the solution execution.

The answer to ROI comes with certain bracket values, meaning it is totally dependent on the use cases you use in Automation Anywhere. You need to understand the ROI of that particular automation solution when developing it. If it really values the development and the use cases, I will give an example. If it is monitoring stuff and there are five people onboarded for monitoring your systems, it is worth developing an automation on Automation Anywhere and making it automated for completing that monitoring report and sending it over email. You can remove those five resources, which counts as ROI for that. The ROI will be very high, considering ninety percent. However, when you go with any business case for which one person is deploying and that use case has been executed only once a year, there is no point. Even though you can automate, it does not consider value-for-money automation if it is executing only once a year. It totally depends on the use case. In a nutshell, if I am talking about this rate, it will be value for money considering the larger aspect and the solution available on the marketplace.

I did not purchase the license directly from Automation Anywhere. My organization handles this and took a call to obtain it for me. I am the user. I do not know whether it is through a third party or direct from Automation Anywhere, but I believe it is direct.

The main competitors in the market are two. One is UiPath. Another is SAP IRPA.

Working with Automation Anywhere is quite technical. When you have a business person who holds technical knowledge, they will find it easy. However, if there is a non-technical person who does not know anything about the technology and they are only business drivers, they will find it very difficult due to technical terms that need to be understood to operate it. I will not count this only on Automation Anywhere; I count it on any RPA  tool in the market.

Automation Anywhere has its own tutorials, which you can do to help. However, when we talk about business persons, if any solution which is built on Automation Anywhere is very easy to use. However, if you are talking about using Automation Anywhere itself for business persons, it is very difficult for them considering they need to understand the technical terms. Regarding the training, it has its own tutorials and training programs in which they can participate and learn. There are multiple platforms also available. For example, on Udemy, they can get their hands dirty with some training and training systems, and they can use it.

The main benefits Automation Anywhere provides for me divide into multiple aspects. If we are talking about taking the requirement and all, there are some pre-built solutions available from the marketplace which you can use. The understanding of the tool and utilizing it for the purpose allows you to use the template directly and build your own solution. The execution or the orchestration part of it is very good. All these aspects come together when considering the benefits of the tools.

All RPA  tools used in the market have similar features and aspects that can be developed. However, specifically for Automation Anywhere, the ready-to-use templates which can be used as plug and play are a great feature. You just need to build a solution around it. This is a very good feature that saves time to build a bot or build any automation to get it business-ready or go live easily considering the other automation tools. That is the major aspect I can find in Automation Anywhere. I would rate this review a nine out of ten overall.

For business users who do not have technical skills, I find Automation Anywhere  very easy to use as it depends upon the configuration done by developers. For example, in invoice processing, we implement a human-in-the-loop where ARI or Copilot screens notify business users on Microsoft Teams . They can click on a message to see all details assigned to them, and both they and the manager can see how many people have assigned tasks, what approvals are needed. This familiar approach makes it easier to manage.

Additionally, if we implement Copilot inside applications like Salesforce , managing customer support becomes very easy because all details are available in their screen dashboard.

For example, in a large real estate company developing buildings, we provide a Copilot screen where they can see data extraction on one side and all documentation on the other. This setup highlights issues, allowing users to simply click on approve or reject buttons, streamlining communication with vendors without manual emails, ultimately pushing invoices directly into ERP  systems like SAP or Oracle Fusion for further approvals if required.

In my day-to-day applications, I can integrate Automation Copilot easily as I can embed it within Workday , BambooHR , and Salesforce , allowing business users easy access to Automation Anywhere  without logging into multiple applications, thus saving 85 to 90% of the time.

The features I find most valuable in Automation Anywhere include traditional automation and Copilot, as well as document automation and the new feature Gentiga, which is also a most valuable feature.

Automation Copilot has increased my productivity significantly.

The rewards I find from my projects going on in production are significant, and I am busy with that all the time.

I believe there is room for improvement in Automation Anywhere, particularly in their training programs, which need more development.

If I could add additional features to Automation Anywhere, I would focus on enhancing the intelligence within document automation.

I also think there should be improvement in integration with third-party solutions, though I believe they are positioned well in the market. Agentic process automation certainly simplifies life for developers and users alike.

I have been using Automation Anywhere since 2019, which is seven years.

My impression of Automation Anywhere's ability to provide automation at scale is very positive since it has been evolving and focusing on agentic process automation, showcasing their commitment to research and development and creating products that are scalable.

I rate the technical support provided by Automation Anywhere as good and compare it positively against products like 360, noting that the product has stabilized, resulting in fewer queries—just about five to six tickets in a year. Since we buy the sub-support pack, we usually get resolution within one to one and a half hours.

I would rate their support at 9.5 out of 10.

The initial setup of Automation Anywhere is easy; since it is now cloud-based, we do not have to worry about setups, and we can set up the entire system as production in about 10 to 15 minutes.

I have not seen the upgrade process as I have not directly performed any upgrades. With the cloud, they notify us of scheduled upgrades, often without causing downtime, and inform us about any affected modules, allowing us to manage our processes accordingly.

I find the pricing of Automation Anywhere a little bit high compared to India, but it aligns well with the global market, which I would say is the correct price or slightly less.

To maintain the processes in Automation Anywhere, we require personnel. Currently, about six to seven people manage 300 processes with weekly or monthly monitoring, especially when some applications are updated, necessitating adjustments to our bots according to changing business applications.

The time spent maintaining bots depends on the process and how many changes are within the front application. For example, transitioning from Oracle EBS  to Oracle Fusion involves a complete overhaul.

I rate this review 9 out of 10.

I manage the product for our organization, and there are multiple use cases being deployed in Automation Anywhere . Regarding Copilot in terms of increased productivity, we are not currently using Copilot.

Automation Anywhere  does require maintenance. Any product needs maintenance, so we take care of maintenance with respect to version upgrades, operating system upgrades, and server infrastructure. We are properly planning and running this show. We only experience planned downtimes and maintenance, so nothing comes up where the product goes down immediately because of some issue.

Less than one full capacity is involved in the maintenance processes generally. Maintenance time in our organization will be less than the maximum. If it is a version upgrade, it will take more time. Standard maintenance will be completed within a set number of hours. Version upgrades take a minimum of four hours.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use for business users who do not have technical skills because with hands-on training, they are able to pick it up. We have many business users in our organization who go through two or three days of classroom training on the product and have started developing their own use cases by themselves.

I am satisfied with the learning curve for Automation Anywhere. Automation Anywhere is providing really good support and hands-on support trainings, which is really helpful for the product to catch up on updates.

The most useful features in Automation Anywhere are all the action packages, which are mainly connected with integrating with multiple applications. These features are easily accessible and configurable, and we have many use cases that depend on those features. All the integration features provided by Automation Anywhere are really helpful for building strong use cases.

Automation Anywhere can improve the product in potential areas of improvement with respect to automation and AI. From the automation workspace point of view, they are doing well. From the AI point of view, adapting is still in a very early stage, and there are certain things that are difficult for users to adapt on the AI side. Since I am an on-premises user and there are cloud users also, certain AI components that they release are not that effective. They are in a trial and error method for releasing products and trying them out. At the end of the day, certain components are not useful at all. They need to think, revalidate, and release the product according to business need.

Regarding functionality for Automation Anywhere, I am totally satisfied with the automation workspace, but I feel some lack of functions in automation with AI. Automation with AI is not completely satisfied.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for six years.

I rate the stability of the product as nine.

I rate the ability to scale as eight.

Regarding the ability for automation and scalability for processes, there are two aspects: the product and the use case. At the use case level, we have respective features like WLM (workload management) or device management with which we are able to scale and run huge use cases based on demand. This feature is really helpful. On the other hand, regarding Automation Anywhere itself from a scalability point of view, we are currently running with a big user base, and we are in the maximum scalable configuration. We cannot go more than that, but that is where we are now. It is a one-time activity to set everything up where we need to spend effort. After maintaining it, everything has been fine.

I rate the technical support for Automation Anywhere as nine. I am totally satisfied with the response time and quality.

I am working with Microsoft Power Automate  also. There are certain things in Power Automate  where, from scalability and sustainability point of view, Automation Anywhere is more dependable than Power Automate. For more critical related use cases, we cannot go with Power Automate. We find that Power Automate is not that dependable for critical use cases where Automation Anywhere is highly dependable.

I find the initial setup for Automation Anywhere simple. I would rate the initial setup as nine.

I purchased Automation Anywhere directly from the vendor, not through partners or marketplaces. We have an enterprise license contract with Automation Anywhere.

The main benefits Automation Anywhere provides are the cost benefit that the product is providing. Comparing to other products in the market, we are getting all the features in hundred percent quality with what the objective needs to be met by other products, and that is also delivered in Automation Anywhere. From the business point of view, the cost benefit factor is the first point. Second is the ease of deployment that we are getting on Automation Anywhere. This is more convenient from the users' point of view. Development and deployment are not cumbersome for them when they get into Automation Anywhere. Comparing to Microsoft Automate  or others, we need to set up the environment with a lot of dependencies. Comparing to that, Automation Anywhere deployment is better.

When I think about the upgrade processes in general, I find them very easy. I do not see any concerns. We have been doing this activity for the past six years with Automation Anywhere, so I do not see any concerns. The only concern we faced was when we migrated from the client-based deployment, version eleven, to version 360. That was a big hurdle. Other than this, the upgrades and deployments in version 360 are very small.

The challenges we are trying to solve by implementing Automation Anywhere stem from the fact that we are a big enterprise organization. Handling certain enterprise core applications and connecting with them presents challenges because certain applications depend on cloud-based setup, which is not possible with other solutions. With Automation Anywhere, we are able to achieve easy deployment with easy integration of all our enterprise core applications. This made it easier for the user. Any automation product has the challenge of always connecting with core enterprise applications. That is the core challenge. Once we are able to connect to the applications, then we can do all the automations on top of it. That becomes much easier.

I am currently working with RPA  and still using Automation Anywhere. Automation Copilot is another product that I am aware of, but we are not using it completely. I would recommend Automation Anywhere to other users. My overall review rating for Automation Anywhere is nine.