Dive Brief:

• Robotic process automation (RPA) revenues will reach $1.9 billion in 2021, up 19.5% from 2020, according to Gartner projections published Monday. The growth rate signals sustained interest in the technology, with 2020 revenue projections up 11.9% from 2019, when RPA revenues reached $1.4 billion.
• Come 2024, large organizations will "triple the capacity of their existing RPA portfolios," Gartner said in its report. Most additional spend will come from enterprises turning to the vendor market for add-on capacity.
• As the technology evolves and adoption expands, average RPA prices will drop 10% to 15% in 2020. Costs will fall another 5% to 10% annually in 2021 and 2022, creating what the firm says is "strong downward pricing pressure."

Dive Insight:

Sustained interest in RPA technology can be traced back to the impact of the pandemic, according to Cathy Tornbohm, distinguished research VP at Gartner. 

"The decreased dependency on a human workforce for routine, digital processes will be more attractive to end users not only for cost reduction benefits, but also for insuring their business against future impacts like this pandemic," said Tornbohm, in the announcement.

Nine in 10 large organizations are expected to adopt some form of RPA by 2022, Gartner projects. With RPA set to become table stakes, the onus on the enterprise is to identify what applications can deliver the most impact, where to introduce the technology and how to turn adoption into long term cost cuts.

RPA can promise efficiency across different industries, and executives are responding. In healthcare, half of providers are expected to use RPA by 2023, seeking ways to automate the IT helpdesk or physician credentialing. One-quarter of finance executives expected more spending on RPA deployments throughout the pandemic. Use of RPA in the construction industry will grow by almost one-third.

And interest spreads beyond IT. In the next four years, nearly half of new RPA customers will come from outside the IT organization, according to Gartner. The top vendors target chief financial officers and chief operating officers in addition to heads of IT, according to Fabrizio Biscotti, research VP at Gartner.

"They like the quick deployment of low-code/no-code automation," Biscotti said in the release