“RPA is driven by demand, not speculation.” Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account ” ToB Industry Headline “(ID: wwwqifu) , author Li Xiaosong.
If an industry is suddenly hot, it will eventually come to peace. This is an inevitable rule for the development of everything. Even the RPA that everyone knows and knows in the ToB industry in 2019, it is difficult to escape this fate.
But calm is not a bad thing. Only by returning to calm can we take a calm look at the future of RPA behind the impetuousness of capital operation.
Thanks to the wild surge in UiPath valuation across the ocean, throughout the year, there are endless RPA manufacturers in China. This year, there were no less than 10 Chinese RPA vendors that received new financing, released new products, and started another round of transformation.
On the bright side, the RPA explosion seems to be a capital carnival. But if you really go deep into the industry, we will find that RPA is able to land because of its real value.
RPA is intelligent software, which can also be understood as an automated robot. As long as the rules are designed in advance, RPA can simulate the tasks of “fixing rules, repeating, and adding value” such as copying, pasting, clicking, and entering manually. We have all learned the pain of Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V. If the repeated paste work process is simple and the rules are clear, RPA can completely replace this type of work manually.
First, can land is the root cause of RPA explosion
Although RPA is strongly related to artificial intelligence, RPA is not “strong as many concepts, few landings, and blindness as soon as they are applied ” like most artificial intelligence. Almost from the beginning, Chinese RPA manufacturers have figured out the landing scene, and the product is to solve the problem.
Looking at the domestic RPA manufacturers that have become famous this year, whether it is Abbots Technology, Daguan Data, or Cyclone, Cloud Expansion Technology, almost all of these companies have settled in financial, fiscal and taxation processes. Repetitive “and” clear rules. ”
Tiefeng Liu, CTO of Abbots Technology, bluntly said: “ Everyone knows that AI will replace labor in the future, and the former AI is a bit invisible. RPA is the tentacle of AI landing. , Automation is easier to understand. “
The reason is simple, justTake an example of a bank with a large amount of documents and relatively uniform business processes. If the AI can “photograph” the data on the document and fill the data to the designated location directly through the RPA process, it will undoubtedly greatly improve work efficiency.
Similarly, the invoices and bills processed by the company’s finance also need to extract a large amount of data from the physical invoice (paper) and fill it into the system. If there is blessing from RPA, this kind of work will obviously be easier.
In the past, RPA was not popular because the AI was not mature enough, the “photographing” was inaccurate, and the semantic logic of the text could not be understood. With the maturity of AI technologies such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and NLP (Natural Language Processing), extracting content from solid text and pictures for classification and filling has almost become a landing technology that everyone can understand.
It is in this context that RPA can become an important position for AI landing. Most of the Chinese players who entered the RPA this year have a strong artificial intelligence background.
Second, RPA explodes Cannot do without AI blessings
The “ToB industry headline” simply made an inventory of the RPA vendors that have had a more significant impact this year, and we found that:
Before expanding RPA business, Abbots was an artificial intelligence company focused on using AI technology to improve the production, extraction, analysis, and presentation of financial data; Daguan Data did text understanding and text analysis; it also came to be a voice assistant, The semantic robot …
These RPA vendors with self-developed AI capabilities are actually different from those of traditional Chinese RPA vendors such as Yisaiqi or global RPA giant UiPath. AI technologies of RPA vendors such as UiPath and Yisaiqi are not self-developed, but integrated.
We can’t yet assert Which way is better, “AI + RPA” and “RPA + AI integration”. We can only say that the former relies on self-developed AI capabilities to make RPA better connected. The company’s original business guarantees service quality; the latter can provide customers with more AI options to meet the rich needs of customers, and the platform can also rely on light weight to achieve rapid expansion.
At present, the RPA industry has just emerged and everything is being explored. No matter which method is adopted, we all know that the development of RPA is definitely inseparable from the blessing of AI capabilities.
Therefore, RPA vendors with self-developed AI capabilities, such as Abbots Technology, have not fully imitated the UiPath and Yisaiqi models and chose external AI capabilities. They prefer to use the “self-developed AI + RPA” model to establish a solid barrier for themselves. They just use RPA as a business extension rather than define it as the core of the enterprise.
“ RPA is driven by demand, not concepts. People want to use AI to solve duplication and inefficiencySimple work, this is the actual demand. However, in our opinion, RPA is more like the expansion of AI capabilities, playing the role of connecting more businesses in the form of tentacles and bonds, but RPA is not the whole of a company. “Said Liu Tiefeng.
In his opinion, strong AI capabilities can mine more RPA scenarios. Without self-developed AI capabilities, RPA is easily limited by the level of third-party technology at the scene expansion level.
“In the future, the RPA market’s killing will lower the service price of pure RPA scenarios. In the scenarios that require AI functions, pure RPA companies are likely to be greatly challenged by AI + RPA companies . “
Why has RPA not been popular for more than ten or two decades, and no manufacturer can be remembered? Why did RPA get hot when AI companies entered after Abbots, Daguan Data, and Lai Ye?
Obviously, the hotness of RPA is closely related to the overall improvement of the level of artificial intelligence technology. Since technology has created a blast in the industry, who dares to say that AI technology is not the new core of the RPA industry?
3. The RPA is caught in a white-bladed battle just after the fire
In the past, we always felt that RPA was only popular this year. It should be a blue ocean market that can be entered, but Liu Tiefeng said: “This market has reached the point where there is a shortage of soldiers. There are so many big customers in the market, they will definitely be in multiple RPA vendors choose the most appropriate. “
So, we find from Abbot’s product matrix diagram that Abbot’s core architecture is still built on AI technologies such as unstructured data extraction with completely independent intellectual property rights, financial industry NLP, and knowledge maps. The main business is still products and integrated solutions for the financial industry, including intelligent investment research, intelligent risk control, intelligent post-investment, and intelligent operations.
Abbots Technology only uses RPA as a catchment for connecting various businesses, improving the overall efficiency of the solution internally and better serving customers outside. In this way, one can ensure that the company does not miss the RPA vent; the other is that the enterprise’s AI capabilities can be continuously updated.
“ Self-developed AI + RPA’ At this stage, it may be able to better connect the company’s business and bring real efficiency improvements to customers. ”Liu Tiefeng said.
Although the RPA industry has existed for nearly two decades, the concept of “AI + RPA”Pick it up and enter it into the new system.
Although this is just an example, it can’t help but cause us more thought. Now that the market with strong demand for RPA is already in the throes, then is there a need for transformation in industries that have a low level of informationization and have not yet been deeply touched by RPA? Is this need not there? Or is it because the technology is immature and the service is not in place before, and there is still no way to transform it?
Furthermore, there has been a debate in the RPA industry whether to take a standardized route or a customized route. In fact, this kind of controversy does not only exist in the RPA industry. The entire Chinese ToB market is discussing this unsolved problem.
DCM Zeng Zhenyu said in an interview with IT Orange: “ RPA charging by robots is a natural advantage and may break the barriers to traditional SaaS or enterprise services revenue ceilings in China. ”
Before expanding more scenes and not finding a more ideal rapid expansion method, Liu Tiefeng said that the SaaS model is difficult. The ratio of “ 80% service + 20% technology” may be the solution that Abbots prefers.
“The competition in the ToB industry is the competition of the comprehensive strength of the enterprise, and RPA is based on the overall service capabilities of the enterprise. Although technology is the key, you can on the technology, how to ensure the continued stability of the product nodes and how to really go deep Customer understanding of needs is the most critical thing. “
The reason why 20% is focused on technology is that the current technology level of RPA manufacturers is relatively close. Without further breakthroughs in the RPA scene, the competition has not yet reached the stage of comparing technologies.
Rather, China’s ToB market is currently in a period of gradual improvement. There are many diversified demands from customers, and they are not cold about standardized products. 80% of the service focus is related to the general environment of the Chinese service market. After all, the focus of enterprise service is on service.
Of course, these are just the doubts raised by the “ToB industry headlines”. How to solve them still needs to be discussed by manufacturers, users, investors and experts in the RPA industry.
But it is certain that “AI replaces people to work” is an irreversible trend. It is for this reason that RPA landing and explosion is the right thing to do. “
Look over here
Recruitment of the first batch of CEOs of the “E-Club Creators Club” relies on media insight, influence and industrial resource advantages to connect the value of venture capital circle resources and contacts to accelerate the empowerment of entrepreneurship. Insight into the core needs and carefully polish the five rights and interests to help you on the road to entrepreneurship! 
The “ToB industry headline” simply made an inventory of the RPA vendors that have had a more significant impact this year, and we found that:
Before expanding RPA business, Abbots was an artificial intelligence company focused on using AI technology to improve the production, extraction, analysis, and presentation of financial data; Daguan Data did text understanding and text analysis; it also came to be a voice assistant, The semantic robot …
These RPA vendors with self-developed AI capabilities are actually different from those of traditional Chinese RPA vendors such as Yisaiqi or global RPA giant UiPath. AI technologies of RPA vendors such as UiPath and Yisaiqi are not self-developed, but integrated.
We can’t yet assert Which way is better, “AI + RPA” and “RPA + AI integration”. We can only say that the former relies on self-developed AI capabilities to make RPA better connected. The company’s original business guarantees service quality; the latter can provide customers with more AI options to meet the rich needs of customers, and the platform can also rely on light weight to achieve rapid expansion.
At present, the RPA industry has just emerged and everything is being explored. No matter which method is adopted, we all know that the development of RPA is definitely inseparable from the blessing of AI capabilities.
Therefore, RPA vendors with self-developed AI capabilities, such as Abbots Technology, have not fully imitated the UiPath and Yisaiqi models and chose external AI capabilities. They prefer to use the “self-developed AI + RPA” model to establish a solid barrier for themselves. They just use RPA as a business extension rather than define it as the core of the enterprise.
“ RPA is driven by demand, not concepts. People want to use AI to solve duplication and inefficiencySimple work, this is the actual demand. However, in our opinion, RPA is more like the expansion of AI capabilities, playing the role of connecting more businesses in the form of tentacles and bonds, but RPA is not the whole of a company. “Said Liu Tiefeng.
In his opinion, strong AI capabilities can mine more RPA scenarios. Without self-developed AI capabilities, RPA is easily limited by the level of third-party technology at the scene expansion level.
“In the future, the RPA market’s killing will lower the service price of pure RPA scenarios. In the scenarios that require AI functions, pure RPA companies are likely to be greatly challenged by AI + RPA companies . “
Why has RPA not been popular for more than ten or two decades, and no manufacturer can be remembered? Why did RPA get hot when AI companies entered after Abbots, Daguan Data, and Lai Ye?
Obviously, the hotness of RPA is closely related to the overall improvement of the level of artificial intelligence technology. Since technology has created a blast in the industry, who dares to say that AI technology is not the new core of the RPA industry?
3. The RPA is caught in a white-bladed battle just after the fire
In the past, we always felt that RPA was only popular this year. It should be a blue ocean market that can be entered, but Liu Tiefeng said: “This market has reached the point where there is a shortage of soldiers. There are so many big customers in the market, they will definitely be in multiple RPA vendors choose the most appropriate. “
So, we find from Abbot’s product matrix diagram that Abbot’s core architecture is still built on AI technologies such as unstructured data extraction with completely independent intellectual property rights, financial industry NLP, and knowledge maps. The main business is still products and integrated solutions for the financial industry, including intelligent investment research, intelligent risk control, intelligent post-investment, and intelligent operations.
Abbots Technology only uses RPA as a catchment for connecting various businesses, improving the overall efficiency of the solution internally and better serving customers outside. In this way, one can ensure that the company does not miss the RPA vent; the other is that the enterprise’s AI capabilities can be continuously updated.
“ Self-developed AI + RPA’ At this stage, it may be able to better connect the company’s business and bring real efficiency improvements to customers. ”Liu Tiefeng said.
Although the RPA industry has existed for nearly two decades, the concept of “AI + RPA”Pick it up and enter it into the new system.
Although this is just an example, it can’t help but cause us more thought. Now that the market with strong demand for RPA is already in the throes, then is there a need for transformation in industries that have a low level of informationization and have not yet been deeply touched by RPA? Is this need not there? Or is it because the technology is immature and the service is not in place before, and there is still no way to transform it?
Furthermore, there has been a debate in the RPA industry whether to take a standardized route or a customized route. In fact, this kind of controversy does not only exist in the RPA industry. The entire Chinese ToB market is discussing this unsolved problem.
DCM Zeng Zhenyu said in an interview with IT Orange: “ RPA charging by robots is a natural advantage and may break the barriers to traditional SaaS or enterprise services revenue ceilings in China. ”
Before expanding more scenes and not finding a more ideal rapid expansion method, Liu Tiefeng said that the SaaS model is difficult. The ratio of “ 80% service + 20% technology” may be the solution that Abbots prefers.
“The competition in the ToB industry is the competition of the comprehensive strength of the enterprise, and RPA is based on the overall service capabilities of the enterprise. Although technology is the key, you can on the technology, how to ensure the continued stability of the product nodes and how to really go deep Customer understanding of needs is the most critical thing. “
The reason why 20% is focused on technology is that the current technology level of RPA manufacturers is relatively close. Without further breakthroughs in the RPA scene, the competition has not yet reached the stage of comparing technologies.
Rather, China’s ToB market is currently in a period of gradual improvement. There are many diversified demands from customers, and they are not cold about standardized products. 80% of the service focus is related to the general environment of the Chinese service market. After all, the focus of enterprise service is on service.
Of course, these are just the doubts raised by the “ToB industry headlines”. How to solve them still needs to be discussed by manufacturers, users, investors and experts in the RPA industry.
But it is certain that “AI replaces people to work” is an irreversible trend. It is for this reason that RPA landing and explosion is the right thing to do. “
Look over here
Recruitment of the first batch of CEOs of the “E-Club Creators Club” relies on media insight, influence and industrial resource advantages to connect the value of venture capital circle resources and contacts to accelerate the empowerment of entrepreneurship. Insight into the core needs and carefully polish the five rights and interests to help you on the road to entrepreneurship!