Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)

I have been working with Automation Anywhere  for three years now. I work for an American insurance company, and we use Automation Anywhere  for going out to insurance carrier websites to download loss run files, and we also use Automation Anywhere to extract information from those files. It's really just a fetch and then retrieving the data out of the files.

Automation Anywhere is quite intuitive. I came from using Blue Prism  for three years, and I am self-taught within Automation Anywhere. Some of the advances that they have made recently with the debugging and being able to step into bots have been super useful. I quite appreciate that they are always innovating and trying to improve their product. Some of the things that are there and available to use are really powerful and it is super useful.

We do not use Automation Anywhere with business users. It is solely within a technical team, but it is quite useful for demoing the code. Business users can follow along because depending on the view that you use, you can use it as a flow with screenshots for the different UI elements that you have interacted with. It is really useful to show that this is the button that we are clicking and it is going to do X, and then they can follow that along, almost in the way a design diagram would work.

We have had a massive return on full-time employee resources that we have saved by just using Automation Anywhere. Since I picked it up and joined the team, we have found different areas to use it beyond the main one that I stated earlier. We have a lot of daily processes running now that take a lot of manual work off our business users—the simple day-to-day tasks that do not require much thought but are quite time-consuming. The return on investment is massive and it is super useful. Within the organization, we have opened up a lot of really useful dialogue and improved a lot of processes because of it. It might not be directly because of Automation Anywhere, but it might have been through business users seeing some demos and some of the solutions that we currently have in place, which has enabled them to go off and fine-tune things themselves and come back to us. As a product within our organization, it is very useful and we have had a lot of good return out of it.

We do not use Automation Co-pilot, Process AI, or RI. I and my team do not use any of the Co-pilot features. It is one of the things that we probably should get involved with, but I have done the training on it. It is just finding the time to try and implement that from what we are currently using to slot that into our day-to-day practices. We have not had that opportunity to fully learn it and then interact with it. I find that things with Co-pilot, even for Microsoft, are more a case of learning yourself how to work it and get it to do what you want to do, as opposed to Automation Anywhere where I can think it and I should be able to do it, and I would find that the quicker way and probably learn more about what I am actually automating in that way.

Being able to, within the debugging code, start from a specific point would be massive for me. For example, if you had something with forty steps but you only had to test from step thirty onwards, that would save a lot of time because what I end up doing is taking the steps to the very top, running it down, then I have to delete it out and go through it again, and it is not running within the actual flow. Being able to start an automation or a bot from that specific point would be super useful. What they have done lately with being able to step into bots and out, and enabling break points, has been massive and has helped hugely, so it is good that they have taken previous feedback from developers on board.

There is room for improvement around the recorder function. Based on the website or the UI that you are interacting with, if it is older, it can be quite difficult to define and locate the element. Sometimes I find going through the different spy modes or capture modes that some of them can be really hit or miss. If you are not using the basic default one that is there, which tends to give you your DOM X path and your attributes and path, you cannot locate it through that for whatever reason due to the way a UI or a website has been built, usually poorly. You have to go into the accessibility modes and it sometimes can be really difficult to hone down to it. Or it might work locally and then when you put it onto a bot, it does not. Really just a fine-tune and maybe add more capture modes if possible through the recorder feature would be helpful.

I have been working with Automation Anywhere for three years now.

The only time we have had performance issues was when they pushed an update for the recorder package, and it brought down a lot of things across all their cloud environments. I think it was related to a Chrome or Edge update, one of those Chromium  updates. Beyond that, we have had no real outages. There have only been a few times where the control room went down, but it is back up within a couple of hours. For us, it was down in the morning, which would be in the night in the US, so we have not been impacted too much, which has been minimal. Apart from the Chrome issue, which took them maybe a week to fix, we lost a lot of processes during that time, but it just happens unfortunately.

Any time we have had to scale, such as when we outgrew the desktops that we have had in place, it has been quick enough to scale up. Usually, the hold up would be on our side, getting the remote desktops built and the specs set up. But whenever we need a license, it is usually pretty quick from Automation Anywhere to get that available for us. We tend to know in advance when we are going to need it, so we order it or inquire about it within about a month, and it is usually there within a week or two.

It is, in all automation, unfortunately up to the websites or UIs that you are interacting with. If they make a change and do not give you notice or there is no test environment, then you are going to be impacted and have downtime. Regarding Automation Anywhere itself, there has been no real issue any time there are package updates—they just install a new version and your current version is still fine to run. I have found out that you can do an environment-wide push or update of all the packages, which has been super useful as well. There has been no real maintenance beyond the maintenance of the bots or flows themselves, which is caused by outside parties or platforms making changes to their data or UI.

The tech support is probably a seven or eight. There is always room for improvement with everybody.

I switched from Blue Prism  to Automation Anywhere because of the companies I was in. The previous company I was at used Blue Prism. I then switched over when I changed companies, where they had Automation Anywhere already installed. That is what I had to pick up and learn from scratch. The adjustment period was quite straightforward. It was not overly complicated, which was quite nice. I have attended the Automation Anywhere Imagine conference before and spoke with some of their technical experts and asked about qualifications and if it would be worth doing. They asked about my level of experience, saying I would not need it so I should be fine, which was a relief.

We went directly through the license that we have. We work directly with them, and I was at the conference either last year or the year before, which would be 2024. It was in Austin, so I got to meet a lot of the technical people and see what the upcoming products were as well.

I have only been involved in setting up new remote desktops. I work closely with the system team or one of the support people, and we installed that together along with the required build. We have installed three since I joined. The first time was because neither of us had been through it, so it was maybe a bit trickier, but we worked through it within a couple of days, and the next two we have set up since have been really straightforward, which is good.

I do not have it off the top of my head. It is something that my boss tracks. I am the lead engineer within the team, but I think maybe last year we probably saved upwards of a million dollars through the use of Automation Anywhere. In terms of return on investment, we have not had to hire contractors to do work or we have freed up full-time resources to go off and do more useful things that they have been able to do—things that require thought and analysis as opposed to the just if X do Y scenario. I think it is approximately a million that we have saved in the last year.

I have nothing to do with that. I think I have been involved in some conversations, but it is all over my head. I am given the tools to work with, which is nice. I am far enough down the totem pole that I do not get involved in costing and those conversations.

We have gone with an AI model instead to do our extraction using another third-party vendor, but the conversations we had were super useful. I cannot fault the support that those people had with trying to get us off IQ Bot, and any questions we have had where we have been really stuck, they have been responsive usually within twenty-four hours depending on office hours.

We are keen to explore automation and try to use it as best we can. We automate either getting files or details from emails, and then we push that data through AI, hopefully to an in-house model that extracts and sorts what we need, which will either push it to the right website or pass that information on to the correct people.

It would be a case of starting small. Look for small wins first, as opposed to trying to automate something big. If an organization is using it for the first time, you want to ease people into it because some business partners can push back if they do not have a proper understanding of automation. Given the current climate, a lot of people think of AI and robots taking people's jobs. So it is really about starting small, nurturing that automation, getting confidence, doing lunch and learns, reaching out to departments and seeing what you can do, demoing to show the capability. That should then create a really healthy pipeline for any automation team.

I would rate my experience with Automation Anywhere as probably an eight or nine out of ten. Some of the experience I have had, I have enjoyed using it. It might have scored higher if I had never used Blue Prism before, but seeing different flavors of things out there could also be from a technical point. There are probably certain things I have not unlocked within Automation Anywhere yet that I could explore. That is one of the joys of automation—there is always something new to learn and always something to upskill on. Automation Anywhere is a really useful product and we probably do not actually use it to its full potential within the company. We are just sort of in our ways of how we are using it currently, but it is definitely something we are going to explore going forward.

I use Automation Anywhere  for various things, especially in most cases, like automating most of my tasks because I'm always having multiple tasks such as email deliveries and so on. It helps me to automate all those tasks.

Being something we use daily also helps us with document management and file automation. It simplifies all our file management. It is easier to navigate because we are used to it. It helps us with editing, scanning, extracting some data, and so on. It's something that we use commonly in our organization.

I use Copilot, previously known as AARI, and it's not bad, as it is good for that in-app natural language experience, finding the running automations, and then the tasks at hand. It's not a bad one and simplifies our work.

Automation has helped us improve productivity in that it first of all saves time. With that, of course, that improves things, and we can now do other tasks. On top of that, because of the automation, at least we are able to eliminate those human errors, maybe missing out on something. It is really good for improving our productivity and has helped us a lot.

I'm just a user, an end-user of Automation Anywhere . I have no affiliations. For improvement, perhaps what I can say is that sometimes I get challenges with the customer support team. When I contact them, they are sometimes busy, and I get delays in replies. They always reply, but at a later hour on some days, although of course, some days they are responsive.

I started using it earlier in June last year, but it's not that I had some stopover and then again just resumed recently.

I wouldn't complain about the stability of Automation Anywhere. It's stable. There's nothing that crashes or any abrupt shutdowns. It's always consistent.

The scalability is also good. It's a good one.

The quality of the support is a good one, but it's just those delays when we need immediate help. I would rate it a seven out of ten. It's not bad and good, but there are only delays when they are replying and they take some time. Not every day, but of course, some days.

I had used Blue Prism  for a short time, but I didn't have a good experience, so I had to change.

The learning curve of Automation Anywhere was a steep one. It was hard to get used to the software initially, but then after some time, I was okay with everything. Initially, the deployment was a little bit tricky to get used to, but with time, we are now okay. Initially, it was a little bit complex.

I have an estimate for how long it took to deploy it. I estimated around two to three months.

It being a decision made by our big IT team, everyone also has their other reasons why we had to switch from Blue Prism  to this one.

Both are good, but personally I would prefer Automation Anywhere. It's much easier for me, easier to navigate, no coding is required, simple to use, and pricing is fair.

I got the link on the platform of Automation Anywhere. It was an invite through a form.

Currently, I have no specific feature I would demand in Automation Anywhere. Of course, I would be happy if they added any other feature that would make my work easier. Although I'm not certain of which one, but at the moment, everything is okay with it. If they can also make any additions, it would be good.

Currently, it does not require any maintenance on my end.

I have no major complaint about the integration of Automation Anywhere into my workflows, APIs, and business applications. The integrations are always okay. I have no major problems. It integrates easily with our systems. It has no main challenges.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere to a new version is now easier because I've done it multiple times, so it is easy. No problem with it. It is okay.

The pricing of Automation Anywhere is, I think, not bad and a fair one. It's not so expensive, but of course, it is worth the cost. It is good pricing.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten because it's something that I really depend on. File transfers, managing my tasks, automating, managing, monitoring the event logs, that automated monitoring of all our server logins, then also detecting any problems in the process and errors, and so on.