Companies around the world experience mounting pressure to perform and increase control costs, while delivering excellence into the customer experience.Robotic automation, known as RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and RDA (Robotic Desktop Automation), is considered as the 4th industrial revolution. It brings opportunities to maximize efficiency, reduce costs, increase flexibility, enhance accuracy and maintain consistency, while allowing front-office and back-office agents to focus on other strategic areas.

Since Robotic Automation can dramatically reduce the handling time per task, it requires less manpower to produce the same amount of work; some can easily think that it will destroy a lot of jobs in the future.

Thierry Petrens, CEO of Kleptika was a guest on Business Breakfast talk-show on Dubai Eye to explain his views on the long-term impact of Robotic Automation.

Every industrial revolution has generated fears over job losses. On the one hand, there are those who believe that the rise of software robots represents a threat to industry and the current way of working. On the other hand, we at Kleptika cannot stress enough the opportunities and hope Robotic Automation is bringing to our society. We believe robotic automation represents an opportunity to re-imagine business processes and their interdependencies.

Indeed, a significant part of the time saved thanks to Robotic Automation will be used to capitalize on the ability of the employees to work at added-value tasks, such as delivering higher customer experience. It will also create new jobs related to process optimization and automation. By removing tedious and repetitive tasks, it will improve the overall quality of jobs, elevate employees’ skills, and propose new career paths.

Robotic Automation is a natural next-step in the evolution of companies’ transformation, but it is not capable of building relationships, or replacing all systems and staff.

Technology is not a threat: it’s an opportunity. The agents of the future will manage automated entry-level and focus on creating broader, more strategic value for worldwide businesses.

And we are not the only ones believing that: take a look at what the recent Redwood Software report found when summarizing current robot usage and the growth of interest in organizations. The study found that 27% of the participants are using robotics, 35% are actively looking, and 38% are curious or researching. In addition, 67% said they plan on using Robotic Automation in the next 12 months, and 72% plan to leverage existing investment in ERP to drive further automation in the next 12 months.

“For more than a hundred years we have been making jobs uninteresting and deskilled. Robotic Automation will finally allow firms to remove the robot from the human and make jobs more interesting, meaningful and skill-based!” says Thierry Petrens.