Automation Anywhere Bullish on India and GenAI is a Big Tailwind: Ankur Kothari The company has about 1,600 employees globally, out of which nearly 800 are based out of the India. Most of the company's R&D and product engineering talent sits out of its Bengaluru office.
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Automation Anywhere is very bullish on India and the recent surge in artificial intelligence (AI) and GenAI have acted as major tailwinds for the company, Co-Founder and COO Ankur Kothari said.
The company has about 1,600 employees globally, out of which nearly 800 are based out of the India. Most of the company's R&D and product engineering talent sits out of its Bengaluru office. The clients are mainly from verticals like the banking, financial services & insurance (BFSI), telecom, logistics, and retail.
While the US is the largest market for Automation Anywhere in terms of revenue contribution, India is a "strategic market in terms of usage of our technology," Kothari told Entrepreneur India. "For instance, we do business with many of the GCCs in India but the revenue gets recognized in its headquarters, say the US or UK."
Kothari said Automation Anywhere is experiencing "decent growth" but in the last few years, AI has "supercharged" most automation programs. "We are very well-placed to take advantage of that. Recently, we launched our Gen-AI Process Model Duo, which learns from 300 million plus automations. So, it's like a model that sits on a foundational model, which has all the learnings of automation, so it processes the language," he added.
Automation Anywhere started as a robotic process automation (RPA) company almost two decades ago. "That technology kept on evolving into an end-to-end automation cycle of intelligent automation. The last few years, we have been working on connecting the power of AI and automation in our tech at various levels in our platform. You can put AI to work using automation. Automation has the necessary scale that is needed to put AI to work in an enterprise. And AI has the cognitive capability to let automation do more hard work. Thus, we started combining these two technologies and then created a platform, what we call agentic process automation," said Kothari.
Agentic automation can automate 40-80 per cent of work processes in contrast with RPA which could only automate 20-30 per cent. "It significantly increases your aperture on what you can automate. But at the same time, it reimagines the entire work, modernizes the work," Kothari said.
He believes the role of automation has significantly evolved over the years. "Previously, automation was only about finding efficiency and productivity. Now, it is multiple and multifold. A lot of revenue, customer growth-related stories are getting prioritized. In addition to efficiency and productivity, the third dimension is about improving customer and employee experience. You see a lot of automation in service desk, internal help desk, and all of that."
According to research firm Gartner, by 2026, 30 per cent of enterprises will automate more than half of their network activities, an increase from under 10 per cent in mid-2023.
"Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders are increasingly looking to AI-based analytics and augmented decision making, including intelligent automation (IA), to improve operational resilience and responsiveness, address complexity and process increasingly large amounts of data through automation," said Chris Saunderson, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner.
