Automation Anywhere (AA) recently announced its acquisition of Klevops declaring a “new Attended Automation 2.0.” HFS sees a much-needed injection of orchestration alleviating the inevitable chaos that attended bots originating at individuals’ desktops create as they increase in number. Klevops built its software to meet these specific orchestration and collaboration challenges.

Klevops attracted AA’s attention while still small and not well known. It hails from France (as did Contextor, now SAP) and originated as a service company, developing its technology in the field. The terms were not disclosed, but it is likely not a big deal as the company was a startup working in an accelerator environment with no known customers. 

Attended automation is on the ascent; it must be managed carefully as it grows

In our ongoing conversations with AA to date, unattended automation (no humans) took center stage in discussions around IQ bot enhancements, SaaS and cloud enablement, and its visual bot creator. This figures—unattended automation has dominated growth so far. HFS estimates AA’s total automations to date as about 70% unattended and 30% attended. Thirty percent is certainly a notable amount and AA reports recent growth (attended), citing challenging conditions in front offices serving customers while suffering from high employee churn rates.

Robot chaos stands in the way of scale—should democratization really be for everybody?

If successful, Klevops’ tech should help AA’s customers progress beyond experimentation toward RPA deployments that impact business outcomes. Remember, conversations about automation and scale are confusing—be careful what you use as a measure of value. It’s impact and business outcomes that matter, not bot count! The lack of a consistent definition of what constitutes a bot makes counting them essentially useless. 

So, let’s simplify this point about bot management and orchestration through a hamster analogy. Imagine you want a wheel to turn. You decide to set hamsters to work on the perimeter. You think it takes less time, effort, and resource to turn a wheel at the perimeter rather than making it turn on a central axle—and hamsters are cheap. It’s so easy. So, you set them off, and they make the wheel turn. Good decision. Sometime later, you’ve got a wheel that sometimes turns smoothly but sometimes doesn’t. And you’ve got a lot of hamsters. You’re paying per hamster, but you can’t say for sure which are doing wheel-turning work. Some of them seem to be tripping up others. It’s confusing. What’s more, hamster management and maintenance is hard work, and it’s so expensive to outsource. It’s a bit of a mess. 

This ridiculous situation reflects the experience of many with attended automation. If you want that wheel to turn in a controlled fashion, and it matters to your business and customers, then manage the hamsters or risk failure. If you omit software robot orchestration, your automation is not sustainable. 

Human-to-bot collaboration must be supported by a many (humans)-to-many (bots) relationship 

Attended automation typically resides on the desktop. A one-to-one relationship exists between the bot and the human (or desktop). Klevops offers a collaboration workbench and a collaboration platform. Humans can interact with each bot through desktops and various channels: desktop, VDI, smartphones, skype, slack, chatbots, etc. Klevops tackles the constrained, complex mass of one-to-one relationships between humans and bots on desktops; it “enables several employees to orchestrate attended automation tasks across multiple groups of employees and multiple bots.” Bots are created and stored centrally in the cloud or on-prem, then called upon as needed. This strategy blurs the line between attended and unattended automation and allows bots to pass data between the front and back offices. We like the vision but will wait for execution as AA internalizes and applies Klevops’ technology. 

While the broader workflow or orchestration of attended bots makes sense, we still believe the vision (paraphrasing UiPath) of a bot on every desktop is both a blessing and a curse. It offers democratized automation, but it is potentially unmanageable and difficult to optimize. In contact center environments where attended automation is maturing quickly, the onus is on process reinvention—where attended automation is baked into refined processes—rather than requiring a conscious deployment by already frenzied agents. Now, managers can choose between a true “virtual assistant” limited to a user’s desktop, and the Klevops approach, which is visibly less democratized, but agents benefit from automation and bots are well managed. 

Expect this wave of consolidation among RPA vendors to continue 

All three large robotic process automation (RPA) vendors recently announced acquisitions. Is this the start of a collective shopping spree? Probably. Automation Anywhere (AA) acquired Klevops not long after Blue Prism’s acquisition of Thoughtonomy. Meanwhile, very well-funded UiPath quietly acquired StepShot for automated process documentation capabilities. Each of the big three is well-positioned to acquire smaller players that fit their product roadmap strategy. Acquisitions look like growth and investment in product rather than cash burn. Blue Prism splurged on Thoughtonomy, and there’s plenty of scope for AA and UiPath to incorporate smaller players too. The prevalence of appetite for growth via M&A suits startups whose end game is exit by acquisition. 

The Bottom Line: With automation, you must consider orchestration and usability from the start. It doesn’t take long for a mess that obscures the benefits to manifest. 

Automation should see software doing what software is best at (number crunching, lists, sorts, repetitive actions) leaving humans free to do what they are best at (sensitivity, empathy, collaboration, relationships). Setting individual and similar (but different) software robots to work from desktops on processes that should be handled uniformly is problematic. A convoluted chain emerges, with software robots replicating what humans do when compensating for software, integration, BPM, or workflow limitations while executing processes.  Neither humans nor software gets to shine.  

HFS has long called for a little realism in the RPA industry, ensuring no enterprises or humans (or hamsters) are harmed.