Electronics

The "digital workforce" market is accelerating. On September 5th, Huawei and PricewaterhouseCoopers held an RPA+AI strategic cooperation signing ceremony at the 2021 China International Trade in Services Fair. At the signing ceremony, Zhou Wei, Director of the Construction and Management Department of Huawei's GTS Industry Partners, revealed that RPA Huawei internally refers to them as "digital employees." Currently, Huawei has more than 8,000 digital employees. In this cooperation with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the two parties will jointly carry out in-depth cooperation in the fields of SaaS services, financial sharing, and industrial cloud, to create a better “RPA+AI” (digital employee + artificial intelligence) solution enabling industry.

At this service trade fair, not only Huawei and PricewaterhouseCoopers, but also Laiye Technology and Daguan Data brought related RPA "digital employees" solutions to the exhibition. The "digital employee" market is heating up, and currently includes Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud. According to a Deloitte RPA research report, if a Fortune 1000 company with a revenue of US$20 billion and 50,000 employees is calculated, 20% of the workflow can be automated by RPA, then it can bring in more than US$30 million per year. profit.

Data show that there were 17 RPA financing events in China from January to July 2021, and the compound growth rate of RPA was 64%. What exactly is a "digital employee"? Will "digital employees" replace us in the future? What are the difficulties in this market? What are the future trends? Who are the current players in the market?

What is a digital employee?

What exactly is RPA (Digital Worker)? Does it look like us? In fact, RPA is a kind of intelligent software. The full name of RPA is (Robotic Process Automation), which means robotic process automation, and can also be called "Digital Labor", which means "digital labor" and "digital employees". It can be understood as the process of automatically executing business processes with the help of automated robots to reduce human intervention and operations.

Currently, PwC, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and Deloitte all have clear definitions of RPA. According to the definitions of these four major industries, three key points can be summarized. One is that RPA is software, not a physical robot. The second RPA application scenario must meet two conditions: a large number of repetitions (to make RPA necessary) and clear rules (to make RPA possible). Third, as long as the two conditions of Article 2 are met, RPA can be applied to any industry and any scenario.

What exactly can RPA do? From the perspective of the securities industry, the common business scenarios of RPA include business liquidation, automatic market opening and closing, regular inspections, monitoring during market opening, asset management system operation, custody system operation, counter trading system operation, retail system operation, and financial system operation , Report submission, etc. After Orient Securities introduced RPA, it can save more than 20,000 manpower hours per year in terms of work efficiency, and save manpower costs 3 million yuan per year. Haitong Securities currently has more than 10 departments that have applied RPA, and more than 200 automated processes have been launched in 4 years.

Of course, it is not only in the securities industry. As long as it meets a large number of repetitive and well-defined jobs, RPA is very useful. Huawei is also a typical example. At this signing ceremony, Zhou Wei revealed that Huawei now has more than 8,000 digital employees deployed through RPA, which are widely used in various business areas such as production, manufacturing, finance, HR, retail, and auditing. This is Huawei’s consistent approach. As long as you practice useful solutions, it will soon evolve outside the company and empower more industries. Huawei’s RPA products are currently used in digital government, transportation, finance, and manufacturing. Many industries have been applied.

RPA can also be combined with many technologies in many forms. At this service trade fair, the Daguan Intelligent Office RPA robot display device brought by Daguan Data can imitate the daily office operations of business personnel. In order to analyze financial statements, the robot can automatically read the three major financial statements through OCR to read the subject and amount information in the financial statements, and then automatically upload them to the financial report analysis system. The system uses NLP technology and accounting industry knowledge to accurately read the financial reports. Subject and amount information is structured and integrated to calculate changes in financial subjects, and remind the salesperson to pay attention to and analyze the reasons for the changes to improve the quality and efficiency of the credit process.

At present, Daguan intelligent office robots can be used in multiple text processing scenarios such as bank flow recognition, form recognition, invoice recognition, procurement contract, bond fundraising letter and other document key information extraction, document comparison, document review and so on.

Still facing challenges from the formation of the plan to the landing application

The demographic dividend has disappeared, and it has become more and more difficult to recruit skilled employees; the cost of living in cities has soared, leading to rising labor costs, etc., and many reasons have further promoted the rapid development of RPA. According to Gartner data, the growth rate of global RPA business is growing at a rate of 60%. As more and more enterprises begin to accept and apply RPA, this non-intrusive automation technology is gradually becoming a basic capability of enterprise organizations. According to a McKinsey data report, more than 70% of the world's top 500 companies are using RPA robots.

Delivering more repetitive tasks with clear rules to digital employee RPA is becoming more and more enterprise choice, so this is bound to be an increasingly large market, and it will also be an increasingly hot one. market. The hot market will inevitably attract a large number of contestants. At present, there are three types of competing companies in the RPA market.

One type is new RPA technology companies, such as New New Technology, Laiye Technology, Daguan Data, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, etc., are all new RPA companies. At present, these companies are becoming the new favorites of the capital market. Second, traditional software companies represented by Microsoft, SAP, UFIDA, and Kingdee have all launched related RPA solutions. The third is Internet companies represented by Alibaba Cloud.

This is the crystallization of abstraction and optimization of technology and business processes, so it faces challenges from forming a plan to landing applications. As PricewaterhouseCoopers and Huawei said: The "hiring" process of digital employees is not simple. For most companies, the process from applying RPA technology to training their own digital employees to truly generating business value is still a time-consuming, labor-intensive and highly uncertain process.

To sum up, there are still challenges in the development of RPA. The difficulties of RPA mainly focus on how to judge whether business scenarios are suitable for RPA; the difference between the RPA industry and the conflict between RPA standard products; how to define RPA with the help of related tools and the value of RPA.

In the future, RPA will accelerate its evolution, and one of its directions is to integrate with AI. This time the direction of cooperation between Huawei and PricewaterhouseCoopers is RPA+AI. In addition, all-in-one and platform-based products are the direction of its future evolution. In July, Xinnuo Technology and China Electronics Technology's Puhua basic software, Huakun Zhenyu reached a strategic cooperation, the three parties announced that they will jointly build Xinnuo artificial intelligence all-in-one machine, this form allows users to not need to consider the layout of the infrastructure, and On the one hand, it has built and launched a general industry RPA platform to accelerate its service-oriented operation.