UiPath: RPA and AI will be commoditized productivity tools within 5 years

"In three to five years, RPA and AI will become a commodity productivity tool, the same way as you use Excel and PowerPoint," proclaimed Boris Krumrey, chief robotics officer at UiPath, at the AI Summit in London last week. Robotic process automation, or RPA as it's often called, isn't the sexiest concept to emerge from the technology sphere, but it is a fast-growing industry -- and it's one that could reshape the workplace of the future. RPA brings automation to laborious enterprise tasks through smart "software robots" that replicate repetitive (and tedious) tasks through rules-based processes. The technology is installed on top of popular business applications, which may include enterprise resource planning (ERP) software or customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and it monitors what humans do so that it can emulate them. If you ever have to carry out manual data entry tasks for hours or days at a time, RPA could be the answer to your prayers. Some estimates peg the RPA industry at $2.3 billion today, and it could grow to more than $4 billion by 2022.