What needs improvement with Automation Anywhere (AA)?

The workflow has a complex drag-and-drop interface that is not user-friendly and requires a good technical understanding, which can be challenging for users. Additionally, the IQ Bot configuration is complex and requires significant effort to interpret unstructured data effectively. Simplifying these aspects would be beneficial.

I struggled with understanding the use of different variables during my initial time with Automation Anywhere. We have three types of variables. We have user-defined variables, system variables, and config variables. Sometimes, we get confused about the values stored in various variables. If the tool could show the current value stored in the variable, it would be much easier.

Automation Anywhere has newly integrated the Generative AI feature. It should be more customizable. Currently, we can change certain parameters, but we would like to have the ability to do modifications within the LLM for better outputs. We would like the ability to fine-tune it. It would be better if Automation Anywhere could add some extra features for us to use the Generative AI feature.

The learning curve for Automation Anywhere is steep, especially for advanced features like IQ Bot and API automation, which require technical expertise. While basic automation is relatively easy, the platform's documentation and training materials are not comprehensive, making it challenging to master the more complex functionalities. Compared to UiPath, which offers extensive resources and support, Automation Anywhere's limited resources contribute to a steeper learning curve for those seeking to utilize its advanced capabilities. From a business perspective, Automation Anywhere is expensive compared to other tools like UiPath, making it unsuitable for small or medium-sized businesses. It requires robust systems to run efficiently and previously had limitations integrating with legacy systems, though they are improving this with REST API support. Additionally, community support is slow and unhelpful for critical issues. While they offer IQ Bot for unstructured data, it can only automate around 50 percent of such processes, requiring manual intervention. Although Automation Anywhere supports customization, it is limited. These are key areas where Automation Anywhere could improve.

Automation Anywhere's frequent updates are unnecessary and disruptive. Updates are often pushed for no apparent reason, even for perfectly functional packages. This excessive update frequency is undesirable and should be reduced.

One of the main concerns with Automation Anywhere is the lack of a robust feature for capturing and managing information from the user interface, something competitors like Blue Prism already offer. In Blue Prism, you can create an "application model" to capture every control on a screen and assign them to variables, making it easy to reference and update them in your code, even if the screen layout changes. In Automation Anywhere, however, you must manually search and update capture instructions within the code, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Implementing a similar feature in Automation Anywhere would be critical for improving efficiency and maintainability. While this idea has been discussed with the company, it has yet to be implemented. For experienced developers, there's room for improvement. For instance, code refactoring, a valuable feature, is currently impossible in Automation Anywhere. While Automation Anywhere is excellent for beginners, it could benefit from enhancements for advanced users.

Automation Anywhere can improve its integration. For example, you can't directly integrate Automation Anywhere with SharePoint or third-party applications seamlessly. Adding seamless third-party integration would add a lot of value to the platform. We need to use APIs or Python coding to integrate the third-party applications. If Automation Anywhere could add some connectors, that would be great. I'd love to see the ability to build web or mobile applications that are integrated with Automation Anywhere bots, so that a user can work on a web interface directly. Then, it can be linked to the Automation Anywhere bots in the background. They just hit a button, and all the data or information will be used by the bot to do some process in the back end.

Reporting could be better because there is a little bit of overkill in getting information about the utilization of the bot license. This could be a little bit improved. We sometimes have a problem with the connection between the control room and the database, but it is not very often.

A standardized improvement area for any RPA tool is making it more user-friendly. This can be done by allowing users to give instructions in their language. For example, one should be able to say in his or her language to automate the login page of the XYZ application. It should be able to create a flow based on the information or screenshots that the user provides. This is the next step that Automation Anywhere should be able to achieve. Based on the information given by a user in the dialog box, the tool should be smart enough to prepare a workflow that the user can simply play and test. It is more related to AI than RPA. Its stability can also be better.

The Copilot recently integrated into Automation Anywhere requires significant refinement and additional features. Essentially, it still necessitates manual review, which is inefficient. For example, instructing Copilot to write code for opening and reading an Excel file generates necessary commands but still requires developer input to specify target data, column numbers, and desired data. This indicates a need for further training to enhance the bot's capabilities. Integrating Automation Anywhere with existing systems often proves challenging due to the prevalence of legacy applications that are not automation-friendly. Unlike modern applications with easily identifiable elements, these older systems require creative problem-solving to develop reliable and error-resistant automation. This challenge is common across the RPA industry, necessitating innovative approaches to data extraction. For instance, utilizing software development kits, XML files, or APIs can be more efficient than navigating through multiple application pages. Additionally, implementing fuzzy logic scripts is crucial for handling data entry errors, such as name variations, to ensure accurate matching and process success. The learning landscape for Automation Anywhere offers various certifications and training materials. While the community provides a platform for interaction and resource sharing, not all training content aligns with the specific needs of developers. Additionally, the community forum, though helpful, doesn't always provide timely or comprehensive solutions to user inquiries. The company's internal structure, with multiple product teams, can also complicate the process of obtaining support and resolving issues.

Automation Anywhere could improve its integration with Python and other programming languages.

The tools are fundamentally solid. However, when I think of self-healing, such as automation with a new prompt or a new Windows patch occurring, being able to handle those kinds of things on top of what Automation Anywhere already does and that automatically click through and do the reboots that are necessary to just have a clean run would be ideal. That way, no one has to wake up in the middle of the night and adjust something. That would be amazing.

Some of the biggest improvements they can make are with the interface. It can be improved in terms of usability or searching for something. For example, icons are hard to find. Typically, you jump into the search box, but being able to go in and find things quickly with the eye could be very valuable.

The only thing I would advocate for is making Automation Anywhere's developer environment Mac-enabled because many of our graduate students are coming out of school with Macs. Everything else in the Automation Anywhere world is built for Windows.

We'd like to see more AI features.

Automation Anywhere can be improved by offering more integration with many more applications. While it is very integrated nowadays, the complexity is a key issue. Common users must have the opportunity to integrate it with many more environments.

From a platform perspective, our model has been getting operational data back out to our automation owners. We are a pretty small team. We have about 70 automations in production. Everything that we automate, we naturally own a fraction of that just from a technical perspective. Having a team of developers, you want them focused on building new things. We are at an inflection point where we have automated so much that just keeping the lights on certainly takes 20% to 50% of the time, depending on the time of year. Being able to enable the stakeholders is one of my main focuses. If we are automating their process, I want them to continue owning that as much as possible. We are just expanding on the bot insights. From a security perspective, there have been some challenges for us getting our customers in there from a role-level security perspective and making sure that they have full access to the control room and their automation after it is automated. Being able to manage a digital worker has been a big focus. That is what I am looking to get the most out of the tool right now.

If I look across the use cases that we have, there is more opportunity for us to collaborate with Automation Anywhere to see or maybe explore some potential opportunities for new capabilities within the platform. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of anything that they would need to improve on, but there are probably opportunities to explore some potential use cases where maybe there is a feature that is not yet available. We can discover and pioneer something together.

Automation Anywhere's current requirement for upfront annual payments limits flexibility for customers. Offering a wider range of payment options, such as monthly installments, would be a welcome improvement. While Automation Anywhere's current learning materials cater to junior and new users, senior developers require more in-depth content to effectively utilize the platform's full potential.

OCR technology could be more inclusive by offering a wider range of supported languages, as its current selection is limited.

The scripting can be a bit difficult.

Automation Anywhere can be enhanced with additional safeguards during the database-building process to minimize errors. When dealing with a large number of variables, uploading them directly from an Excel sheet to Automation Anywhere is not supported. In such cases, we have to enter each variable one by one.

Automation Anywhere risks falling behind by focusing solely on Robotic Process Automation when competitors offer more versatile and adaptable solutions that integrate AI for a more intelligent automation experience.

I have experienced the issues of UI getting stuck. There seems to be an issue with server stability. This is something that can be better. At times, the created tasks start failing randomly or intermittently which affects the business. They are failing at the runtime because of the bot launch crash issue. Business people are impacted a lot because of these failures at the run time.

While we initially implemented Automation Anywhere due to its inherent strengths, the software landscape has evolved significantly in the past two and a half years. Several competing products now offer superior functionality compared to Automation Anywhere's current capabilities. Microsoft's automation solutions are particularly compelling. They integrate seamlessly with the wider Microsoft product suite, which is often the core software environment for many businesses. This integration advantage isn't present with Automation Anywhere, which operates independently of Microsoft products. The price has room for improvement.

When working with Excel, unlike other tools such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere does not have the standard variables for .Net data types. It does not support data tables and many of the data types supported by Microsoft and the .Net technology. When designing automation, you need to use only the few data types that Automation Anywhere supports. For example, when you work with Excel, you need to do many tasks with the data tables, cells, and rows, but that is more difficult with Automation Anywhere than with other platforms. It is not flexible for custom activities. With UiPath, you can use C#. You can use VB.NET directly. With Automation Anywhere, customization is more complicated than UiPath. There are a lot of resources available on the Internet to learn Automation Anywhere. They have Automation Anywhere University, but the difficult thing is that it does not have a specific path for a beginner. When I was learning it initially, I had to choose randomly. I could not work out where to start. It is probably better now. A good thing about Automation Anywhere is that when the bot is running, it displays which line of the code is running, but we also want those logs to be displayed on the web. When we implement an automation process, currently, we have to write the code to archive the logs. That is the thing they need to improve.

Automation Anywhere is easy, but the Automation Anywhere courses are not so easy. All RPA tools have their own academy where business users can go and learn the solution and do things themselves. Automation Anywhere courses are a little bit complex to understand. You need a little bit more time, and accessibility is also a little bit of an issue. They should focus a bit more on the academy and learning materials on their portal. The content should be easy to understand. It is not easy to grasp for a non-technical person. It should be easy for citizen developers. Also, their certification is very costly. There should be more visibility as an RPA product. Every organization is trying to stick with certain tools. I like Automation Anywhere, and I would like to work with it, but I am not getting an opportunity. Automation Anywhere is not promoting itself to other organizations. Organizations are moving towards Power Automate and UiPath. It could be because Automation Anywhere is not reaching out to companies. Their community events are also less. There are not many developer events in the cities where IT is there. In Bangalore, India, most of the IT companies are there, so we get to go to a lot of conferences. We get to hear a lot from other vendors, but Automation Anywhere's events are very limited. They should take care of their presence in the community and companies. They should introduce videos for the new features. They should promote new features. They should be known to people. They should be accessible to people. Only then developers or companies will know about it. Only then, it will get used. There are probably plenty of good features, but they are not known or explored.

The help Automation Anywhere offers during setup isn't great for smaller companies like ours. It could be improved. Many users in my country lack, for example, advanced Excel skills. This makes using Automation Anywhere a significant challenge for them. The Automation Anywhere community doesn't seem very active. Additionally, navigating their site can be quite difficult when encountering problems. As a developer and engineer, I found it challenging to locate information. Support could also be improved. For example, I had trouble connecting my Google account, and finding help was nearly impossible. In terms of variable initialization, I prefer the previous enterprise version. It was simpler and required less code. Object access could also be improved in the current version. Ideally, there would be an easier and more precise way to retrieve objects.

The AI centricity is a bit behind compared to the way we see Microsoft and AWS doing it. This is the feedback that I have also given to them. They need to expand themselves to provide more services than just RPA. Only RPA may not be enough for us, and it would not be our preferred choice for an automation tool.

We had some issues with screen-scaping and recording. Also, some of the components are not user-friendly enough compared to UiPath. The learning curve isn't very long if you come from a programming background, but it may be difficult for someone without a technical background to understand.

Automation Anywhere should make it easier for developers to manage queues and exception handling. The OCR component could also be better. We have had to use other OCR tools to get information from the account documents.

The Automation Anywhere calibrating needs to be more user-friendly to avoid human error. Non-technical people can not use Automation Anywhere.

To improve Automation Anywhere for the next release, standardization is key. The application should work universally across servers and desktops, without limitations on licenses tied to specific virtual machines. Currently, the one-to-one bot and VM dependency pose restrictions, and a more flexible licensing system would enhance its usability. Additionally, for business users without technical skills, using Automation Anywhere can be challenging. While it is easy to develop automation, deploying and running them requires some technical knowledge. Training is essential to navigate the platform effectively. Upgrading Automation Anywhere can be challenging. Communication about upgrades is lacking, and an auto-upgrade feature or at least notifications would be beneficial. Currently, there is no automatic check for the latest version, and improvement is needed in providing information to users about updates.

The marketing for Automation Anywhere has room for improvement.

From the product side, I like the minimum viable product approach, where the first generation of a new product is released and tested in the market, but it would be great if some of those pieces were a little bit more thought out from a user experience perspective. They could take a little more time to get some insights from their customers like in a beta test or something like that.

I think there are some opportunities to improve integration with monitoring tools already on the market to make this even faster. We struggle a little when applying the upgrades because the control room has some flaws. That's one advantage of migrating to the cloud. If we do that, then we don't have to upgrade manually. There is a SaaS option, but we decided to opt for on-prem and perform the upgrades ourselves. We're thinking of choosing the cloud options in the next version to make it easier.

The price has room for improvement.

If you come across any process, it can be automated via Automation Anywhere. However, companies need to better justify the ROI before usage - otherwise, they might spend money on things unnecessarily.

Novice users are able to automate basic applications using Automation Anywhere. Business processes are more complex and require experts to be brought in to automate. The automation process can be made more user-friendly.

We only faced some problems when integrating it with SAP, and Oracle integration was a bit challenging, especially with Oracle Fusion. We had some issues when we were trying to connect some of the applications on the API level. But, in general, integration using Automation Anywhere is fine.

Automation Anywhere was difficult with certain applications with respect to Java platforms. For these, we'd likely use UiPath instead. Handling Java-based applications or browser-based applications could be better. Automation Anywhere should have more Excel-related functionality.

Integrating RPA bots, APIs, business applications, and documents in Automation Anywhere is a challenging task. We have come across a type of YAML application that we use with the APIs, enabling us to get a holistic picture. However, direct integration has always been problematic. For instance, when attempting to integrate with SAP, we encounter certain gaps. As a solution, we can either input the data into the call sheet or create a YAML application for the integration process. Unfortunately, it is not a seamless process where we can transfer everything directly into an SAP system. This presents a double issue for us. I would like Automation Anywhere to work with SAP and improve their interfaces. The technical support needs improvement. They take a long time to respond, and they are not very knowledgeable.

For business users, the solution is complex and could be made more user-friendly. It is not easy to integrate APIs with Automation Anywhere without a good knowledge of APIs. The pricing of Automation Anywhere is higher compared to other solutions on the market, such as Microsoft Power Automate and UiPath, and it has room for improvement.

There are not many areas for improvement. As compared to V11, A360 is more user-friendly and flexible. It is fine. They have even included support for ChatGPT, Azure, and other things in the latest version. They have incorporated many latest technologies, such as AI, and there is always scope to improve the processes and have more stability.

Automation Anywhere is difficult to use and could be made more user-friendly. The GUI needs to be improved. Using Automation Anywhere can be extremely difficult for individuals who lack technical skills. The learning curve for Automation Anywhere is challenging. We should not need to rely on a vendor to handle the solution. The end-user should be able to use the solution independently. The automation at scale has room for improvement. There are many features missing from Automation Anywhere, including cloud collaboration tools provided by Google and Microsoft, that I would like to see integrated into the solution.

We have a new feature share in Automation Anywhere, but it does not migrate automatically from the previous version to the new one. Therefore, we had to do a lot of work to adapt the records to the network, which was a problem. I would like Automation Anywhere to have more integration with for example, with AI platforms. The technical support response has room for improvement. Automation Anywhere is not user-friendly and could be improved.

The analytical dashboard in the Control Room could use some improvement. Currently, it's quite basic, which can pose a challenge when customers require more advanced features. Of course, different customers will have varying needs and expectations, so there's no one-size-fits-all solution. However, I believe it would be helpful if our team could have more flexibility in developing a more sophisticated analytical bot to meet these diverse demands.

The solution should include an analytics dashboard. As the space is maturing, many vendors sell functionalities as separate components so this is not unique to the solution. If I am buying a license, I should at least get a flavor of my analytics with a dashboard related to operational KPIs. Right now, if you want detailed analytics, you need to buy the dashboard separately. This licensing structure adds to the overall cost. The solution should include bot insights instead of selling it as a separate license. From the bot and business perspectives, insights are important for operational agility metrics and managing KPIs. For example, I want to how many hours in a day or month a bot runs for human resources when it performs A, B, C, D, and E and gives benefits across D, E, and F.

They need to improve the REST Api Documentation because its not well detailed or clear enough for beginners, They need to provide some out of the box AI and ML functions such as Image classification and Objection Identification, They also need to improve the real-time data and analytics,There is less support for various data types, The .NET Framework is not completely supported and they have to add more features to fully support the .NET, Last advice is to add an option for developers for Graphical View along with the Code View option.

There is room for improvement; with the overall architecture as it is tightly coupled. Everything is coupled with the Control Room of the overall product architecture. When I look at the UiPath product, where they have a mostly combined architecture and development environments. It should be more loosely coupled, but both products have advantages and disadvantages. The overall product in Automation Anywhere is good, but they need to improve a little bit on the overall architecture side. Integrations should be included with the analytics platforms and third-party SAP, enterprise-level applications, as well as if there are any built-in connectors where you can connect with the ERPs to automate the required teams. There are ready-made connectors available, which will help to democratize automation across the enterprise with various customers across the globe. They should include integration with not only analytics but also analytics and enterprise applications, as well as advanced AI/ML features. It's not just about the IdP; some AI/ML features should be available. Aside from computer vision, NLP, NLU, and NLG, as well as a variety of other advanced features, should be included.

Their OCR is a bit expensive, meaning the IQ Bot. There are a lot of customers who don't want to use it due to the price tag. Maybe if they price it more aggressively, it could be widely used as well. Otherwise, it has pretty much industry-leading functionalities, similar to any other RPA tool. In general, their roadmap is well defined and we are pleased with its offering.

In terms of what could be improved with Automation Anywhere, there are a few areas. They could improve the environmental stabilizing issues. There are a lot of environmental issues when rolling over from one environment to another, higher environment. This is the one thing they definitely need to look into. They also have to look into the document understanding process - the screen scraping of the documents, etc... In the next release, I would like to see, as I mentioned, better document understanding and screen scraping. There are a few more activities they have to include, like reading the particular column on the Excel operations. They can increase more activities like that. Right now, there are a lot of complications and complexities involved when reading Excel - they could make that easier.

Excel automation or the activities for Excel is an area of improvement.

The solution could improve the integration with some web applications. It was difficult to manage them.

Migration is probably our biggest challenge. When we were trying to do the migration to the new version, it was a little bit painful. We didn't have that many bots, and I can't imagine the level of effort that some of the bigger customers have to put in for that. The product is stable, but moving from one release to the other was the issue. We also had difficulty with some of the documents that we were trying to automate. IQ Bot or intelligent document processing doesn't have all the features and functions that we were originally told it had. They need to improve that. It had some limitations, and we've had to add other products to the mix just because they weren't able to deliver some of the things that we were told that they could deliver upfront. They've been talking about task mining for a while. They don't have a good tool out there to evaluate the current processes and come up with a plan. It is a trial and error process where you have to sit down and go through what different people are doing, for how much time they're doing it, etc. There isn't a good systematic way of capturing that information. There are other products such as Kryon, and there is a new product called Soroco that we're looking at, that would let us evaluate the task that could be automated. So, it is not really process automation; it is task automation. You don't really see end to end when you're doing these projects. You don't just decide to automate the whole process. You select the tasks that you are going to automate, but you don't really know the effect that particular automation is going to have on another task. You don't have the big picture. It would be very helpful if both UiPath and Automation Anywhere provide a center of excellence that you could run on your systems so that the people who are running things come back and say that: * Here is the task that we should be automating. * Here is the time that we are taking to do it now. * Here is what the benefit is going to be. All these are manual today. You're looking at what other companies are doing and hoping that you're going to get an ROI, but you don't really know until you start the project, and by then, it is too late. You've already spent the money on the software, the bot, the integration, the services, etc. At the end of the day, you're thinking if you would get the ROI. You have to measure it to see if you're going to get it after you've already spent the money. It would be really nice to have something that you could run upfront to know about the automation tasks that are costing you money today and where you should focus your efforts on automating.

The product's technical support could use improvement. I can't think of any additional features I would like to see. The existing features are okay.

Automation Anywhere has a lot of room for improvement. It is not customer-friendly. They are always rolling out patches. They have a lot of limitations.

The current version is very effective and I have no recommendation for improvement. Since we deployed Automation Anywhere is has never failed in functionality. It has led to faster growth of our enterprise and lead to increased productivity. Automation of most services has led to faster service delivery and given our organization an opportunity to win over many customers. The next version could have more data storage capacity that can be customized to sustain different workloads. I am satisfied with most features overall and I am very proud of this Software.

Automation Anywhere can improve by implementing a Citrix environment and increasing the stability of tools, such as IQ bot.

They still need to improve the SAP application's ability to use the features it has. For example, we have been using a MetaBot to automate SAP applications. They have given the SAP the ability to command Automation Anywhere itself, but we have encountered some limitations. Microsoft Power Automate has so many connectors, like its connector with Microsoft Office and SharePoint. On the other end, I have found Power Automate to be overpowered compared to Automation Anywhere because they already have so many connectors with Office 365, Teams, and other APIs. There are even more if you consider the cloud flow of Power Automate, so it's easy to get triggered. Automation Anywhere is not so easy to trigger. For example, I can create an automation in Power Automate where the user provides input into a form, such as Microsoft Form, and that info gets pulled into SharePoint. In Automation Anywhere, we do not have some trigger like that. We have to keep one bot running 24/7 to get this data into SharePoint. Power Automate does not have anything like scheduling. Whenever you fill out the form, it gets triggered on its own, and the information is saved into SharePoint. So this is an advantage of Power Automate that Automation Anywhere does not have. Automation Anywhere should add the same feature that Power Automate has, so whenever I create a flow, there is a trigger given by Automation Anywhere. Instead of scheduling that bot on CR, there should be something running in the background constantly, so I do not have to schedule the bot or trigger the bot manually. The trigger should be integrated into Automation Anywhere. Also, if I am creating one variable in one module, I have to make the same variable in another subtask, then I have to create a mapping between those two. If Automation Anywhere were to come out with a feature like Power Automate's environment variables, then that variable could be created globally and used throughout the process. That would be better. Another feature I would like to have in Automation Anywhere is "Go To Line." When we are writing the code, it sometimes extends 500 to 600 lines. If I want to go to some line numbers — say, the bot has failed on line number 120 — I have to go manually to line 120. If Automation Anywhere provided something like a "Go To Line" feature, that would be useful for us. For example, if you face an error at line number 500 and your code is 1,000 lines, you have to scroll so far down to get to line number 500. Furthermore, in Automation Anywhere, you have to write a DLL separately when you want to have something from a .NET perspective. In UiPath and some other tools, there are direct call functions available. It would be nice if Automation Anywhere came up with something like that, where you can directly have the method called.

Their bot runners could be made to handle multiple payloads at the same time because if I want to run multiple parallel operations, the number of bot runners that I have to buy just keeps increasing. It is adding to the cost. However, there is a possibility that we don't need that many bot runners, and we can run multiple operations in a bot runner. This would be a great addition to have.

Automation Anywhere should improve its OCR command, as it's my observation that I have faced data loss or improper data being extracted. If the image quality is low then the data extraction with 100% accuracy is a huge task that I have been facing. If the scheduling of the bot were much simpler, also allowing us to schedule bots prior to the start time, it would be an improvement.

AA has many features but the issue is with the loss of overhead on computing resources. For example, if the bot is encrypted, the bot should decrypt it first then act accordingly. If there are issues with the logic in the bot, there will be a lot of computer memory overload. There should be an additional feature for cloud functionality. Also, there should be an improvement done in Citrix automation. There should be a bit of a pricing cut down as other RPA tools charge only for bot runners. If any new features been introduced it would be a delight for many developers like me.

If I build a bot today and don't use it, however, in several months, someone tries to use it, there's a 30-40% change the bot will fail in one or two areas. I'm still trying to figure out why. It's on a ticket right now. It may be due to updates or changes to the environment. I'm not sure. The solution lacks in the approval process area. They need to provide more solutions.

* Available Data Analytics * More on AI Front and Deep Learn concept

Automation Anywhere changed OCR features in A2019. My suggestion is to improve the OCR command scope and usability. We use OCR for PDF data extraction as we use in V. 11.x product. Automation Anywhere has a perfect structure of working. Automation Anywhere has the best product structure. It also provides support for customers and they respond in 24 hours. They still provide updates on packages to get more accuracy in process creation. The automation has already improved very much.

Handwritten documents are still a drawback to read. Regarding the UI, once you're on some of the screens there are fixed dialogues, they are a set size, so there's a lot of horizontal scrolls and vertical scrolls. If I want to do something that is purely business-related and is somewhat complex to write or is nuanced, I sometimes have trouble implementing that inside of the Automation Anywhere script. I feel limited at times with some of the looping and some of the branching and some of the ways to make procedure calls when I have a complex business issue. Also, there's a loss of overhead of the computing resources in Automation Anywhere. If you have an encrypted bot, the Automation Anywhere software has to read it first, decrypt it, and run it. So there is a potential that, if the logic of the bot isn't good enough, a lot of CPU and memory overload will happen. This is something that Automation Anywhere should look at because it takes a lot of computing resources. I have seen CPUs running at 100%.

The price is a little high and could be reduced.

I have had some difficulty with OCR extraction, which could be a little better. Automation Anywhere is not fully compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer while working with web extraction. Maybe there could be more options added for PDF integration. Having a few practical use cases added to online learning would be helpful for newbies. Other than these, I don't see other difficulties. In terms of extra features, they are adding them day by day to make for the smoother automation of processes.

Bots get disconnected from control rooms sometimes without any reason and this takes up a lot of time. If the user creates a schedule then he/she leaves the company, that schedule became unusable at some point and I can't edit it. We need to create it again using generic IDs. This problem can be avoided in an upcoming release or update. There should be a button for customer support. For each process, we have a separate log folder/files and it's tedious to go and check each process. They should include a button/feature to check the logs for each/process and or bots in the control room itself. There should be an option for the quick addition of disconnected bots/kind of rollback options. I would also like to see the One-Touch Asset management report button in the control room.

I have identified a few areas where one can find the scope of improvement: 1. AA IQ Bot has not yet succeeded in living up to its reputation due to its high cost, low ROI, and its inability to meet client requirements. 2. Commands such as OCR are not up to the mark the output accuracy is not satisfactory. 3. It is unable to identify IF/Else, for Loop block when reviewing/writing AA code. There should be an expand/collapse button to identify a block of code. Integration with Google Spreadsheets and other products should be included in the next release.

When it comes to Citrix automation, AA should improve or add more features in such a way that all the commands should work when automating a Citrix application. There should be more options to write codes in VBScript, C#, Python, etc. directly within any commands, instead of just invoking an already existing script. Since A2019 is cloud-based and since it is a new product, there are a lot of commands that require improvisations such as the Outlook Save Email command, Rest API commands, and a few others.

1) Needs some improvement in IQ BOT: * while uploading input files we are facing issue with grouping even the same kind of PDFs * consuming of CPU utilization and requiring more RAM 2) It is not able to use OCR effectively and has limited usability. 3) Handwritten documents are still a drawback. 4) Some of the control room GUI can be improved, it is also difficult in terms of control room management. 5) If Excel gets hanged Automation Anywhere does not give any notification. 6) Needs improvement in image recognition. 7) BOT insights taking more CPU utilization.

Automation Anywhere has lots of good features. It does not require improvement. I would like if the IQ Bot could read hand-written documents, otherwise, Automation Anywhere is fabulous to work or develop processes for customers. Automation Anywhere has a user-friendly UI to work with so that any non-technical person can easily understand the process workflow. The accuracy of the IQ bot in the new version has been increased. We can make validations to fields in IQ Bot with Python scripts.

I hope that Automation Anywhere can further optimize its bots to help automate tasks with Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft PowerPoint documents because, in most organizations, there is a lot of reporting required. Hence, it would be great and more cost and time-efficient if there is a way to automate everyday tasks such as Microsoft Word Report Generation and Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation Generation. Further, I would also recommend that Automation Anywhere assist users with automating tasks such as the monthly payment of essential services. For example, automating payment of utilities like the water bill or electricity bill, online.

Most clients use systems which use old Java versions, trying to automate on these systems is really difficult since most features/commands are not supported. Java earlier than 1.7 cannot work something and most firms I have interacted with their systems are old. Another thing according to Automation Anywhere, it's main aim is not to change the client's system but to be used on top of the existing one hence Automation Anywhere should consider those clients since in my country most of them use systems which date back to 2000, and they are not willing to spend another fortune to change them just so they can use Automation Anywhere. Additional features: Automation Anywhere should add a couple of commands which will help most developers not to always use a script, a good example is in String operations.

Excel functionalities, the macro interface can be improved in the next release of RPA platform Automation Anywhere. Functionalities such as maneuvering on the excel worksheets, increased capability to manipulate formulae, and other Excel functionalities will give Automation Anywhere and edge in the RPA platform category since most financial applications use a lot of Excel and macro sheets for their calculations and postings. This will not only help the developer in saving time to develop simple keystrokes but also make the final bot much more stable and robust.

There are some areas that the product can be improved : (1) Better exception handling mechanism. (2) Parallel processing of branches to improve execution time. (3) IQ Bot: An easier way to tag the document's source after extracting information from the document. (Which group does the document or a transaction belong to). (4) Better integration with external data sources for Bot Insights. (5) Advocating and encouraging use of queues and device pools by providing implementation details with success rate and support from services for the same.

Especially while using v11, I often experience freezes with OCR extraction from PDF files. It just didn't work properly. I had to work around this using Python scripting. It would be a big improvement to have the inbuilt OCR capability work seamlessly. A perfect OCR would be awesome.

The improvements that we could see would be the increased stability of each A2019 releases and reduce the likely impact on existing features. We are also looking to see improvements in the upgrade and bot deployment processes to make them easier and less interaction with back end servers. We are also to see more features to be added to seamlessly transition between human and bot tasks in the long-running process. We are also keen to see the new AARI feature develop into a voice-enabled command activation to run the bot process.

I would suggest adding more fields while calling in API. There is no option to generate an Authentication token within the Bot. While using REST web services, we faced a lot of issues as we were trying to connect with the Salesforce application which needs an authentication token to connect. Since there was no option to create an authentication token we had to find a different solution altogether. This feature can be improvised. Object cloning is another feature which is not very stable and this can be improved as well

One of the important drawbacks of Automation Anywhere is that it needs to be able to show the automated process as a single flowchart. After complete deployment of the bot, such as a Task Bot, to see an overview of the complete process and the steps in the job is difficult. As such, I would like to suggest that they provide an option to show the entire process as a flowchart. This isn't required for the UI pane, but perhaps simply export it as a flowchart. This would be great. The ability to automate using third-party code involvement should be improved. As far as I know, Python scripts can be used to automate a few use cases but it would be great if there is a change to include the .NET and C# languages. I've also worked on UiPath and .NET code can be used for most of the Excel automation. This includes operations like creating pivot tables and applying advanced filters. These are things that work directly with VB.NET code. Automation anywhere needs a forum where active users can provide answers for standard errors and exceptions. More webinars regarding the latest releases and the features should also be created.

Verbose logging of bot compiling and deployment from the control room. Events occurring during compiling, pre-processing the bots should be logged in the control room or bot launcher logs. Exported bots packages are not updated. Each package must be validated independently upon being exported from one control room to another. Moving away from Client-server architecture to web-based deployment compromised developer experience of app reliability offered by 11.3.X flavors. Desktop app experience >>> Web experience. Developers are not pleased.

I still believe there is a long way to go when it comes to ML & AI capabilities, though Automation Anywhere is the leader here in the market. A2019 is awesome with its features but I don't find it as stable as v11. I suggest having more ways to perform string manipulations and string operations, instead of just what is pre-defined in the V11 tool. I would like to have a buffer-type thing where the bot should throw an exception to the production support team when it is looping through a record. Date operations can be improved without using VS script.

Though IQ Bot is the most powerful and effective cognitive OCR platform for data extraction in the market, still, there is a lot of scope for improvement as there are a lot of non-standard documents which do not give a high straight-through processing rate and accuracy. Additional features to be included in the next release should be the option to develop basic web portals through which business users can view and run required bots on demand. Secondly, some features of BPM should also be included in the RPA platform itself so that business workflows can be defined and automated easily.

OCR - OCR capability needs to become better. For the handwritten documents, we had a struggle to extract with accuracy while some other market tools were able to achieve it without any issues. The OCR component should allow integration with 3rd party OCR. This way we can use the best of breed solution along with AA or allow better control over OCR packages to be customized. As of now, it acts like a black box where there is very little control over the outcome of the OCR. We had great struggles with a customer who had handwritten data extraction. Finally, the customer was not able to see the value and the exploration went on hold post COVID.

The inclusion of word packages would help us to extract data from Word and automate word-related activities easily. PDF package should have the Read from PDF option. Now we need to convert the word to PDF and then extract data. The quick mapping between the parent and child bot variables should be available. Different tasks should be visible at the same time. Now we need to open different browser tabs to view multiple codes at the same time. A2019 has more features than the v11 version but some mentioned that user-friendly features should be enabled.

We have a challenge in our front office automation where capturing details from a table within a table does not happen in the existing AA Enterprise client version 11.3.4. The AA team tries various methods like using an Excel spreadsheet to capture the tables. Using object cloning it recognizes only the top line items and not the table which is in an HTML format then they asked to use Python codes within AA to identify tick boxes as a windows box. If this gets improved then we should be able to work on all the voice-related projects for a particular healthcare payer.

They bring out new or enhanced functionality on a very short cycle, which is great, although a criticism would be sometimes new features are released so quickly they can sometimes be a little buggy. We have been faced with inconsistent error handling during the bot development stage, which is something that should be improved. The error handling is generally good, but the problem arises when developing multiple tasks within the same project. Specifically, I want to handle the error that occurs in a sub-task, as we have to ensure that all of the relevant tasks are completed properly in order to continue the process. I would like to see a global error handler introduced, which will explicitly handle errors over the entire project. I would like to have a Project Sharing Hub, similar to that of GitHub, but inside the tool. This would help with consolidating all of the project files at the end of the deployment.

Automation Anywhere is the best automating tool on the market and it's very difficult for me to think to suggest something to improve the tool. Here are my few suggestions: Automation Anywhere can include database commands like insert row, bold row, etc commands in 11.x They can also include features like API integration features in the command panel. They should create a standard framework like re framework in Ui Path. As it enhances the capability of the developer to create an automation project.

I think automation anywhere is a complete system if we have to work on structured data that doesn't require human decisions. However, it does not work as well with retrieving data from images. Image automation is something that needs to be improved. One more thing is that Automation Anywhere does not support reading and writing to CSV files. If we are getting input from a CSV file, we have to add one more layer of automation that first saves the data to an Excel file. This is important to us because most of the data we get from the database is saved to a CSV file.

1. User Interface can be simpler. 2. Master Certification now paid (previously it was free of cost) which sometimes creates hesitation to go for it. 3. Though the courses in the certification's learning hub are great and awesome, there is some more space for adding more explained contents. 4. Citrix automation lacks the perfect end to end automation. 5. Web Automation fails when an automated Screen Resolution is changed to some other resolutions. 6. Pricing with respect to the competitors is more.

Automation Anywhere should think about the integration with Machine learning and deep learning with ease, so that AA can be used in various other domains that require human calculation and logic to work. A good application would be IVR, as this can help businesses reduce the response time and achieve better customer satisfaction AA should include more features in the mobile app, such as monitoring and debugging bots. This can help the administrator to look at the status on the fly. They should provide more features to improve the visibility of bots.

Areas that can be improved are: * For assisted automation, the AA bot needs the facility to be triggered through an application interface after collecting input from the user. There is no inbuilt option available in AA to collect all the inputs in an interface. In our case, we built a desktop application to collect all of the user input and, on submit, the .NET code will run the ATMX file. Can AA provide a simple user interface through which a user can collect input and submit it to trigger the bot? * It needs an option to change the Windows resolution. * It needs to have an option to select an object after a three to five-second delay. It is useful in the case of menu selection and this option exists in other tools.

The areas in which the product and service must be improved are in the government sector and ministries such as the Ministry of Education and Health. From my point of view, we need a lot of features that must be added in future releases, for example, improving the special dashboard in bot insight, reducing the duration session from 20 min to 5 min, and added SAP API command. I would like to have the ability to work on a remote desktop connection, run the recording on it and use all commands.

It would be better to make it more user-friendly so that individuals with no experience can pick it up pretty quickly.

Had we had access to the RPA bots in advance, we would have practiced before fully implementing. This is something that should be changed in the future.

Automation Anywhere provides more than 300 commands but it lacks in certain areas like Excel automation. For eg: there is no command to add, rename, or delete sheet. However, meta bots can be utilized for the same. AA sometimes poses compatibility problems with new web browser versions like Chrome. The AA control room is fairly difficult to understand and maintain initially. Integration with new technologies and scripts like Python. However, I have heard that A2019 supports Python scripts. The license prices vary drastically depending upon the partnership with the client. Debugging of SQL queries is hard. The error description is not accurate. I have to initially test the queries on Access and then only I paste them on AA.

1. Data Mapping Utilities 2. Console Management 3. Bot Runner need to perform much smoother 4. It is not able to use OCR effectively and has limited usability. 5. Handwritten documents are still a drawback. Also difficult in terms of control room management. 6. A few applications take more time for loading when integrated. 7. Declaring the datatype of variables is challenging. 8. The process of migrating codes from one environment to the next can be automated as a default function. 9. The webpage for the control room could use some retouching or redesign to enhance the user experience. 10. Many little-usable features.

Points to Improve: 1. Control Room -> While exporting a package, an option to de-select all the depending/referenced files should be available. Currently, it only allows for selecting all the files. Also, the views should be re-sizable as they are currently fixed width. This would enable to view long file names easily eliminating any chances of exporting the wrong file. Points to Add in next release(s): 1. Availability of actions for Date and time functions in task bots, meta bots logics editor like Date Addition, calendar functions, etc. 2. Addition of Assertions activities, that can help with conditional compilations 3. Option to copy multiple variables at the same time (as selected by the developer) 4. Option to close all the task bots files in the editor at a go 5. Option to check-out multiple files inside a folder structure in a go 6. List and array should be made dynamic, as in there must not be a requirement to specify at least 1 element in the list, etc. 7. Deletion of multiple variables in one go (as selected by a developer)

The product needs improvements in dealing with remote servers and providing more APIs that will be used with other systems. Also in need of improvement are: * The AI sense command needs improvement. * Bot discovery needs more work. * Migration tools should be improved. * REST and SOAP services need work. * AA should provide the ability to use custom packages that follow a standard to be imported in RPA. * I would like the ability to use custom cryptography algorithms with commands. * They should improve PDF commands and IQ features to include Arabic language OCR. * The admin user should have the ability to change the tome out of the session.

With more demo recordings and positive real-time reviews from the clients. AA should provide a free evaluation period so it is easy to attract new customers. It is not able to use OCR effectively and has limited usability. Handwritten documents are still a drawback. It is also difficult in terms of control room management. The debugger is also a weakness of the tool, forcing the developer to use error handling or message box to map errors. Few applications take more time for loading when integrated.

The IQ Bot could use improvement.

The Automation Anywhere Control room component features can be improved, as of now it contains too many roles and rules which makes it confusing to use it. They should make it more simple because a lot of times I have to go through the user manual while dealing with the Automation Anywhere Control Room. I always wanted a python and javascript editing console in version 11, which I later found in A2019. Earlier, only Run script command was there to directly run the scripts which somehow creates one additional dependency to the solution.

For improvements, I would like Automation Anywhere to add new default mail operation commands, which might help developers to automate Outlook solutions easily and effectively. Similarly, some PDF commands can help developers to automate complex PDF automation projects and help developers to extract the PDF data more accurately and precisely. IQ Bot has some limitations that should be improved in future releases. It would be great if the work items concept is improved; that would help the developers and support team. The AI and ML features should be more fully explored in the future.

You could improve the tools for reading CSV/Excel, also providing wizards or detailed guides, otherwise, it is quite complex to use them, especially at the beginning. It would be useful to have an online wiki on each tool that can be used on AA with practical examples of use, with images and videos. It would also be useful to increase the community and make public in a forum the problems solved by other developers through the support, so that we can use past experience to solve development problems without having to send emails to AA about a problem that may have already been solved.

The UI can be improved a little bit to make it easier for beginners to understand. There are many commands called Actions that are very good but sometimes, I feel that it should be more comfortable to find and search for specific commands. There should be some type of hint or notification system about what actions are useful, according to the situation or part of the process that it is in while creating the bot. The speed of the bot processing on a whole can be improved so that the bot can run in less time than the task or processes.

The accuracy in Web Recorder needs to be improved, defective outputs found most of the time(not sure if is a website side issue). You cannot add dynamic variables in PDF scanned values, hopefully, this can be added as a new feature in future. Integration with most-used email applications eg: Gmail, Outlook, etc for ease in sending mails without any configuration of port or hostname. This could help to concentrate on actual problems, instead of spending time to figure out port and hostname for sending or receiving emails.

The debugging tools need to be included, for where and why it has failed to execute the bot in a clear manner. Maintaining the bot is a little tough sometimes during a failed issue. If Automation Anywhere is developed in a real-time environment, we can do daily routine our home routine jobs much easier. I am learning a bit daily day by day. Automation Anywhere can also be improved in machine learning and artificial intelligence. It would make our lives easier.

Configuring A2019 and using it is getting a little difficult because of frequent errors of compatibility. It is not so user friendly like the enterprise desktop version. Sometimes the A2019 platform takes too much time in the pre-processing and deployment process which is too time consuming and to solve this we need to restart the services and also sometimes need to restart our machines. This is extra overhead. AA-client is too heavy software. AA-client should support multiple languages. Sometimes the client software needs to login, again and again, every hour and so. Advanced Machine Learning and AI features with visualization capabilities should be included in the tool so that the product can offer many new use cases and

One of the challenges that I face every now and then while working with A2019, is around the bot agent updates. Every week/alternate weeK, I receive an error while running my bots, that asks me to update the bot agent. I have to download the bot agent every time and reinstall it, in order to get the work done. This thing has also created an issue for me in the past, where I need to present something to my US counterparts, and then the bot was unable to run because the bot agent update notification came few minutes before the meeting. This was really frustrating at that point in time, however, fortunately, I got that resolved within minutes during the meeting by updating the bot agent. Hence, I believe, there should be some facility available, which can help me in running my previously implemented bots, even if there are some updates in the bot agent

It would be great if there will be a built-in machine learning model available in the AA, so the developer can directly map it with their task and train the model accordingly. Training and testing the model can be achieved using these features.

1. Excel commands should include more features. 2. Need more variable types for eg. date, amount, number, etc 3. Better API support and more APIs. 4. Queues should be enabled to directly connect to DBs. 5. Managing so many variables is a pain. Some kind of variable initialization mechanism like how Blue Prism has it will be helpful. 6. Input-output variables should be defined for taskbots as well. 7.There are a lot of glitches in AA not fixed since Ver 10. Reach me to know more about them. 8. The commands should help evaluate the current state of variables(like how in Blue prism) 10. Metabots should have command to stop the task. Basically should have all commands of a task bot. 11. No one uses "WorkFlows". 12. The user roles and the Credential Vaults administration, sharing and the whole thing in action is very confusing. 13. Automatic technical logging option should be given by default in all commands like how we have in BP.

I believe Automation Anywhere is working perfectly and it is the best in the market. However, some points based on a development perspective I would like to add are: * Universal search. * Creating a variable from anywhere, including from the properties/attributes of commands. * I would like to have the ability to delete multiple variables. * It should be possible to delete multiple parameters for the API. * I would like to have commands to link with the respective knowledge base. * Having a refractor in the code would be an improvement. * A predefined framework for Bot Development that includes an audit log and error handling would be helpful. * It would be useful to have some updates for the control room in terms of analytics.

We had a few setbacks because of bots getting queued and unable to force delete a task bot which kept persisting in the control room. These features should be included in future releases which will be highly beneficial. Also when the upgrade happened from .14 to .15, it did not allow for the existing task bots to be checked in. The upgrades should work seamlessly to enable high efficiency of the AA product. We need the Business dashboard to be exported to other environments. Also for the availability of G-Suite package in the enterprise edition.

Already the new version is out, which has cognitive abilities. The bot learning skills are there, which helps to train the bot. AA has done a great job by bringing compatibility with IBM Watson and many other AI interfaces. If some more functions we can get related to other web applications will be a great help. At some places, the if-else statements become so confusing so, at that place, they can change the UI for better understanding. Apart from this I liked this tool and would like to continue working on this.

As long as we are using this tool, it includes all features required from a process automation perspective. As of now, we are not looking for any additional features. However in IQ Bot if the following features can be added then I would be very grateful: The recognition of Voice /Audio As of now IQ Bot only takes/fetches the record of the places that we have marked. e.g. Invoices fields that are dynamic in nature are very difficult to fetch the data from the scan copy. If this feature gets added, it will save a lot of time for developers.

PDF extraction and cognitive automation need improvement.

I would like for AA to add an inbuilt debug log that has functionalities to view the values of variables during run time in order to have a point-to-point debugging in case of an error.

It should be easier to use.

Autosuggestion of existing use cases based on the problem statement could use improvement. My primary use cases are where I'm dealing with a lot of raw data extraction and transformation so that the data can be used by other systems. An example would be getting the data out of PDF files, transforming it from semi-structured to structured, and putting it into an extra-stable system like Excel or a CSV so that it can be used by other systems. Listed are low hanging fruits and will boost the confidence of the stakeholders in the RPA deployment, recommend to look at such use cases when looking at Automation Anywhere and its implementation.

The UI could be made better because the UI in Version 11 was better and easier as compared to a2019. We were able to fit in more lines of code on the screen at a time, whereas in a2019, we can see much less. This means that the developer has to scroll again and again to view his/her code. An option should be provided to disable the flow and dual-mode since those are not used often by the developers, and hence take up extra space on the screen. The IQ bot should also have a feature to process documents with multiple invoices, as currently, we need to split the document according to invoices beforehand.

I am currently on 11.3.4.2 and the analytics feature of AA, Bot Insights, needs improvement. It is not easy to implement. It is not intuitive for the developer as you have to mark variables for analytics. Because it is very clunky you either have to build "helper" bots to display your bot analytics or use another platform like Tableau. I would also like to see improvement in the segregation of roles. I still do not understand the login in not allowing the Control Room Administrator to also be a Bot Insights Administrator.

1) We have encountered some issues in the actions like Terminal Emulator-> Send Key -> Page Down/Up not working. 2) We found difficulties while copy-pasting commands after the end of "IF" condition and "Loop". 3) A scroll bar will be good in the "Flow" tab. 4) When any command is double-clicked, if the command opens in a popup window as we had in AA desktop versions, then that could have saved some space for development as the code writing section seems to be less which creates difficulties when there are loops in the loop. 5) Email trigger was also not working.

We do not have a precise area that needs improvement, but sometimes while running bots that traverse through different websites, the screen hangs or takes time to fully load. This in turn increases the wait time. So, if possible, having saved a screen while the earlier bot runs and comparing that saved screen with the current bot run, so as to get an idea if the screen has been fully loaded or not, would be great. Though we can make this happen by adding extra logic to the bot, this would increase the bot size for every new website search.

In A2019 the dependencies that are being downloaded take a longer time that should be reduced. Migration utility should be provided so we can easily migrate from lower versions to higher versions. I would like to have reading from a handwritten text, which they are bringing in the next version. That will be a good thing. Some things that I do not see as of today are interactive chat or video interface. These are things that I will look for in the future. I saw something like image recognition, but something like a video or voice recognition is something that I'm looking for in the Automation Anywhere platform as an end-user.

Intelligent automation is currently a buzz and I would love to see more innovation in this segment. I am looking for artificial intelligence and machine learning to be tightly integrated into the cloud platform and I hope that they enhance this segment in the upcoming releases. Clients are eager to see AI and ML implemented, and thus leverage the technology to its maximum. We can bring more processes into automation, which is what I want to focus on. In a nutshell, more innovation in AI and ML will bring more potential and capabilities to the product.

Custom models with advanced features can be included in the IQ Bot models for unstructured and semi-structured data.

The conversion time of invoices to JSON File should take less time using AA2019 IQBot, the report file creation feature should be added into IQ Bot A2019.

I would like to see a button on the bot developer web page that allows you to "expand all" and "close all" actions, folding them up into their respective "Steps". I would like to see a comment feature that allows you to embed comments/notes into an action sidebar, without having to actually take up a line of code in order to write such a statement. I would like to see a dedicated XPath web interaction drag and drop action that allows you to click/interact with websites via an XPath query. This way, you are not required to use the recorder action to gain this functionality. I would like to see an option allowing you to change the color scheme of the bot developer page, so you can use colors that are less harsh on the eyes when developing a script. A simple dark mode skin would be nice as well.

1. for attended automation, the agent should be able to execute the bot without logging into the control room and triggering the bot 2. There are limited features to automation MS word & PowerPoint will look for more in those areas 3. Include Gsuite based automation 4. limitation on .csv based automation 5. Automations on iframes 6. We want to have greater control on deciding when we want to upgrade to a newer version. 7. Smooth upgrade with no production disruptions 8. ability to manage bots across control rooms 9. Ability to generate reports without using bot insight

IQ Bot requires a significant improvement for its data detection and data retention, mainly from the previously trained documents: regarding the document's format, layout, data contained within the document, the type of data that needs to be extracted. Object cloning commands require a significant improvement in its functionality. It is far too inconsistent with execution within the same application. Plugins for web browsers should be a single plugin that allows for the connectivity and functionality of both the v11/v12 and A2019 software, or at best, allows for both the A2019 and v11/v12 plugins to run on the same client browser simultaneously.

In the control room, the manual bot update should be looked at. I would like to see a technology where they can automatically update or upgrade themselves to the latest version, without having to uninstall the current bot. Bots should also be automatically downloaded to all computers or devices in the organization without people having to individually install them on their machines. The device connection can also be improved, as I happen to lose connection most of the time.

It would be better if they could extend the support for AA version 11 for a few more years, as most of the companies have tasks completed in AA version 11, and A2019 is much slower compared to AA 11. It keeps on downloading dependencies, and time-consuming while running the tasks. In AA version 11, if the bot stops uninterruptedly it's better if it could resolve itself and back to normal and process the applications. You can give clients some more time to get used to A2019 and find and fix the concerns observed till then. That way you can add more features and easy to implement for the development team. If you ask all the clients to migrate to the latest version. Few are still thinking about the migration of code from the old to the new environment and various other factors. Bot Insight for 24/7 tasks is limited in the AA 11 version. If this gets fixed a few more clients will renew this license as well.

The OCR can be a little better because sometimes while scrapping, it leads to data loss. In the future, more commands for automating SAP should be included.

Automation Anywhere is one of the leading RPA tool vendors and they have done splendid work on improving their tool. The places where I still see scope for improvement is in their background automation are, and also their ability to handle Java applications. I feel that document extraction like IQ Bot can be made more refined so that it may reach its full potential. Another area I feel that needs improvement is the variances caused in extraction results when using the tool with third-party OCRs. This is something that needs to be addressed. I believe rather than giving more third-party options, a single good OCR solution must be added to prevent variations in extraction results.

The product is amazing, nevertheless, it would be really great to see the following points being implemented: * Better OCR Extraction: The OCR extraction is good to some extent, but I have seen some cases where it has failed to extract text from a few documents, and this was quite unexpected. * More Excel Commands: The set of Excel commands I am currently using in Automation Anywhere V11.3 are limited. Most of the Excel commands such as filtering and removing duplicates are not available. * Options to edit Document and PPT files: The scope of projects could be expanded if we have such commands.

We are still exploring all the new features and functions of A2019, but one thing I noticed was that it has introduced variable type. While helpful at certain places, I miss the previous method, where one variable can handle any type include a string, numerical, or boolean value. If the option were available to use the old generic-style variable type, it would be helpful. Now, I need to create one variable for holding a numerical value and convert it to a string value to display it on a message box, which is a little inconvenient. This is purely based on past experience. Once I get used to it, I might find it better and more convenient.

Maybe not improved but I heard that the 2019 version is going to look more like UiPath, which is not ideal for a typical/classic developer. The feel of parsing at the code is different from viewing object images for sure. When comparing the code under version checks, although there is a change done, it doesn't say so because the change is done at the variable level and not in the line of code. This is logically wrong, a line would contain n number of variables including object clonings, screen images, variables, etc so any change to any of these has to be captured and shown as a change done in the version history.

* The API integration should be improved further since it is a bit difficult at the moment to connect with the API in the enterprise version. * The object cloning command should be improved such to increase the capability and capture more objects in the UI. * It would be more advantageous if the email automation allowed us to integrate with cloud-based email servers. * Metabots should be improved further, allowing for the same functionality as the task bot. * It would be great if AA could reduce the price of IQ Bot.

I would like to have a simple bot dashboard window for admins to manage things easily. This is important when an organization has a huge number of tasks to be automated because managing tasks can be complex. It would be very helpful if the bot dashboard were simplified for admins. The mobile application can be improved by adding more functions and capabilities abuse right now, only a few features are enabled for mobile users.

Technical support provided by Automation Anywhere is not up to the mark and needs a lot of improvements. Solutions or details provided by L1 support are contradicted by L2 and/or L3 support persons, thus leading to confusion. The quality and response time of the support, even on Sev-1 tickets, is not satisfactory. Enhancements or product issues/bugs are not fixed quickly and no ETA is provided for the same. Working of triggers (email file, etc) in A2019 in unattended mode is a feature that was available in v11 but missing in A2019. I would like to see this feature in A2019. In v11, RDP-based deployment and auto-login both were possible but with A2019, only the RDP-based approach is possible. Due to this, there is no way to maintain any application open inside the RDP, as each and every time Web CR connects to RDP to run the bot and disconnects, it closes all of the open apps inside RDP and terminates. I need a way where open apps inside RDP must be left open if they are open already.

I feel A2019 is still not completely ready and the discontinuing of version 11 is a negative impact for all of the users and clients. I feel version 11 should still be continued and it should be the client's choice whether they want to buy version 11 or A2019.

Automation Anywhere can be improved with respect to the user-friendliness of the interface because most of the competitors are now using a flowchart-like structure, thus making it easy for anyone to learn and study it. Essentially, it's as easy as connecting shapes for each action and process. An area for improvement is their OCR reading for images since some competitors have an inbuilt OCR reader that recognizes various hand strokes much better, thus improving the time and resources needed for transcribing the documents.

One area where I can see room for improvement is the training material that is available. I am aware that the Automation Anywhere university has a lot of training content, and even better, all of it is categorized with respect to the user's role in development. I took the training course related to architecture. This course and content were nice but the videos had a digital voice over, which made it non-engaging for me. After certain videos, you cannot concentrate much. The other point that is relative to my experience is that for a completely new person to RPA, Automation Anywhere may come with a small learning curve.

The time taken to execute a Bot through A2019 can be reduced. It takes time to upload Bots/Files once you click on Run, and it is difficult to wait while we are developing automations because deadlines are always a risk factor for developers. Code needs to be run code multiple times to achieve requirements shared by the client or team. Migration from V11 to A2019 is difficult and needs more attention because it should be simpler. They need to improve the Object Cloning feature because it creates problems when the resolution is changed.

We noticed slowness in a few of the commands like Object Cloning, Web Recorders, etc. on which Automation Anywhere can work to make it more robust. There are improvements required in the WLM solution provided by AA, which can make it a more robust queuing system and the system should retry by itself in case of failure due to system error. There should be the option of selecting credentials by passing variables and not just limit it to selection. Retry mechanism should be included in Enterprise 11.x version which helps developers to reduce the number of lines of code.

My opinion is that we need to have a video or tutorial on how to implement these features, as well as seeing what results to expect. We are having difficulty explaining RPA to users if we have to. The competitors can present the features more interactively using video, which is better than a PowerPoint presentation. Having this would make it easier to sell to the user, because the market in Indonesia prefers to see the demo/result, as opposed to learning the technical aspects first. Similarly, they would prefer to see a success story and case study, instead of listening to a text presentation. I think we need to create an interactive presentation that is more creative and gives more proof of results for the process, and lesser in terms of technical description.

Currently, Automation Anywhere's debugging functionality is minimal. Most notable is that it works on only the top-level task (not on sub-tasks called by the top-level task). This limits its practical usefulness. Increasing the robustness of the debugging functionality would be very helpful. Additionally, implmentation of a "global" variable concept (variables shared across tasks) would be very useful. AA's variable mapping between tasks is cumbersome.

Version A2019, the Number data type variables should be available to display in "Message Box" command. This will help in debugging. At the present, a type conversion is needed to display it in the message box. There should be an efficient way to integrate AA 11.x. meta bots into AA2019. Also, the Master certification should be provided free of cost for partners. More practical samples and examples of bots using new features in A2019 should be available in people Documentation. A2019 presentation material for proposing A2019 as an RPA choice should be provided to partners.

The dedicated BPM from AA should help to cover more use cases. I would strongly say that AA should have a more advanced BPM tool to support the process/use cases attempted in the project. Instead of depending on other open-source BPM products, AA should provide their own BPM for attended automations.

The A2019 Community version does not fully support Mozilla Firefox, as it has problems when you try to capture data from the Firefox window. I would like to see more features added in the Community editions to improve developer hands-on practice. When you try to capture an error snapshot in A2019, it's not capturing the proper data compared to V11. The Recorder action in the A2019 Community edition is not supported. If we refresh the window then it does not show the Chrome window title in the list. This only works on Internet Explorer.

I would like the AA tool to be more proficient and a single entity tool that does not require DLLs or some script to be written separately where it is not capable. It should have more commands, which should remove the dependency on MetaBots or other scripts so that everything is available in the tool itself. This would save time. All the time working on the tool requires internet connectivity, and it will be great if we can work offline. Offline development would be helpful. More features like AI and ML should be included, as well as additional features to automate Citrix applications and mainframe applications. I would like to see more Excel commands available. Introduction to dictionaries and other data types should be included. I would like to have a ready-made framework available so that less time is spent to develop the whole framework for the processes. In terms of robustness, the bot should be efficient enough to deal with the code breakdowns. This could be done with more exception handling features and a ready-made framework. More tutorials with complex scenarios and ILT training would be an improvement.

My suggestion for version A2019 is to enable the Metabot function because it helps us in a shortcut to the integration process with other applications such as SAP, Oracle, and Cyber​Ark. It would be helpful if Device Credentials can sync with Active Directory so that for the IT policy case that requires periodic password resetting, there is no need for a human to input manually into each Bot Runner machine. The quality of the IQ bot can be further refined for scanned documents.

For the short term, in this pandemic era, they should have a feature to write and save directly into Word documents, Office 365, or Google Docs. As it is now, it can only save to Excel files. In the long term, in the cloud era, it would be great if they had an API or connection into other cloud services, such as SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS. This would mean that their automation ecosystem would be more complex, helping to improve our productivity and creativity.

Where minor but widespread changes are made to the cloud product being operated upon (e.g. a banner was added, or dropping all DIVs down 1), changing the cloned search values (Taskbot) individually was incredibly time consuming, and it shut down the RPA service until it was fixed. To counter this, it would be valuable to have a 'mass update' of search values for cloned objects, in a similar way to Metabots. Better tracing of 'if' and 'else' statements and their corresponding 'end' statements would be helpful. Vertical connecting lines would be appropriate within the code, and a collapse/expand feature for code blocks would be ideal.

I would like to see them continue building out documentation with more video-aides. Training is good and interactive, although the final certification exam is very tough and requires practical, in-depth knowledge. The certification exam for AA is not as per the training videos, as the questions are more scenario-based. This makes it very hard for beginners to clear the exam after just tutorial knowledge.

A2019 should have more improvement for developers, as it was in v11.x. For example, copying of specific lines between Bots, and Metabots (Calibrate option). All this will make A2019 even more unique in its own way.

The AI Sense functionality is what I believe can be improved since when I tried to use it for automating a use case involving a Citrix Virtual Machine, it was unable to capture objects consistently. This feature can be made more intelligent and less bulky in terms of the downloadable package size of the code in the next release and also the VB/Python scripts which we can use in conjunction with the AA2019 functionalities is what I believe would help in automating many processes end to end.

For me, IQ Bot needs to be improved. It has great capabilities and works really well for fully structured and spotless documents. When we try to process structured documents but with some little pen marks, improper partitions, or faded documents, IQ Bot fails to extract data properly out of them. Typical Indian supplier invoices are hard to process through IQ Bot. I would love to see a package for Regular Expressions with various sub-commands such as regex builder and regex replace. OAuth2.0 native support should be added in future releases. From a security point of view, there is work that is needed.

In terms of improvement, usually, I have found is not as general as people think. Specifically, as a use case, I am excited to see improvements in having an A2019 cloud control room working and improved on the Lenox environments. A good bit of our finance infrastructure for web-based applications is built in that environment. There is a good bit of dashboard-type development going on in this type of environment already, so the ability to integrate some of the functionality, as well as keep the synchronicity of everything within it, would be a major benefit. Having fewer connection instances would make it more secure, more simple to troubleshoot, and possibly more flexible with the type of applications in use.

It can be improved in a few areas where the legacy system can be read through object cloning. The Image Recognition functionality should be enhanced to improve the accuracy of checkboxes. In A2019, the bot agent will be deployed on the local machine when we run the bot runner, but to download it takes too long, and the user will lose patience. My advice is to improve on this. Sometimes, the files are getting corrupted and this causes us a lot of trouble. This is an issue that is still pending.

The assign value function is not there in the A2019 Community edition, which makes it hard for a developer to manipulate the data. For example, using a data table record, when I want to assign a value to a record variable, I am not able to assign it properly. I am only able to define a hardcoded value inside that variable, whereas the requirement is to put the value inside that variable dynamically using another variable. In the next release, I am hoping to have a feature where the developer can use a programming method like ".Double/.toString" to make programming faster. As it is now, one has to pull commands one by one for assignment. Next, I am hoping that AA can have an explanation and directions for each command and how it is to be used by developers. For example, with the OCR function, it would be helpful to know what data is compulsory for the developer to enter, and what data is optional. By having guide like this, it would be more developer-friendly. This would be better for beginners who are using AA for the first time.

Certain areas of the user interface require improvement. Most of the time, it's pretty easy to drag and drop the required field but it would much better if we had voice commands so that I save time instead of using my mouse and keypad. It would be better if it were digitally designed so that users can feel the live experience as if looking at the exact interface, rather than the logo. Replacing the list of search options with voice commands for each item would be great. I would like like to see changes made to the appearance of the control room. Although we all love the brownish dark mode, it would be better designed with white and orange instead of the dark brown colour on the left side of the panel.

Going on-cloud comes with security hiccups and concerns. The product team has managed to go both on-premise or off-premise, as per comfortability, but the cloud version has more concerns.

Comparing the code from dev to QA or production should be in some easier way. Pausing the bot and resuming it in Metabot should be easier. The Control room audit logs should be moved to an archive for those that are more than six months old. The error handling capability is good but we are facing difficulties when there are multiple tasks in the same project. I want to be able to handle errors that occur in sub-tasks and it would be better to introduce a global error handler so that we can debug all of the relevant tasks. I would like to have a project sharing hub like GitHub, inside of the tool, which will help to consolidate project files post-deployment.

The REST API could be improved.

The product should improve on Voice Recognition and IoT pretty soon, as this is the next big thing in and I would like to see this upgraded in the next release. This is the age of Voice Recognition where systems like Alexa and Cortana are ruling. I would love to see certain features for these. In addition to this, there should also be a community version that will be able to provide support without a cost. This will make sure that the outreach for Automation Anywhere would increase up to a considerable extent.

We have observed that AA gets locked sometimes. After being used for hours with the same bot, while still using the Run Window command and having it in an open state, the users received a prompt to log back into the control room. This is not correct, leading the bot to fail at certain times. In the next release, once the bot is triggered, the system should always recognize the active state and not prompt the user to log in again before the bot finishes all of its tasks.

Many clients use the Citrix environment but AA has very low functionality to automate a Citrix environment. I would like to see improvement in advance Excel commands like lookups, Pivots, etc. After changing the name of the ATMX file, the developer has to remap all the variables again manually at all place and it does not auto handle the renaming of ATMX or variable. In older version 10 it worked fine but from version 11 due to enhancement, this function does not work and faces issues during the development.

Sometimes the tool is timing out, which would be a good thing to have resolved. It will be good if we have a framework that is created with the package, so we can leverage those for the multiple processes. As it is now, we create a base framework. When we have more packages for each of the basic operations, it will be more user-friendly and easier to complete, rather than starting from scratch. Ideally, when we have those packages we can leverage them for overall project development. Adopting the cloud platform will be more convenient, as opposed to depending on the on-premises setup.

While using IQ Bot we found that data extraction accuracy is a bit weaker in semi-structured documents compared with structured documents. We would like to see improvement in the data extraction part of Automation Anywhere IQ Bot. In version 6.5 handwritten data extraction capabilities were not there so if we can get it in upcoming releases then it will be great opportunity to automate tasks which are working on some handwritten documents. Another additional feature we are looking for is logo matching and signature matching capabilities with IQ Bot. In addition we would like to see more compact version of AA which can be controlled over mobile devices.

I would like to have on-call customer care support so that if the user gets stuck anywhere, he/she can get the issue clarified. Additional details or support can be provided for IQ Bots. The Help menu/description can be provided while hovering over actions so that it can help us better to know them. The Variable feature can be improved, as there is no single place to handle all your variables. Sometimes, while recording, the screen hangs and we are not able to perform any actions during that time. Also, the support should be more user-friendly, as we are not getting any support online.

The Web Recorder should also include a feature where the user can select what browser you want it to run since it is currently using the Internet Explorer browser as default. Some of our web-based systems are currently not compatible with Internet Explorer and can only run using Firefox or Google Chrome. Image recognition can be improved if it can still run the created bot in a different PC with different resolution sizes as it is currently very dependent on it and will not able to recognize the image you need if there are changes to resolution size.

I would like to use VB.NET native code inside of Automation Anywhere. If there were a feature like InvokeCode in UiPath, it will help me to write native VB.NET code inside of AA. This would be a relief to the developers. Another feature I want to see is data conversion from one format to another. For example, I want to convert a string date time to Date Time format, or a float to an integer, etc. This will give me the flexibility to interact with other applications and help with passing correct values. I won't have to worry about the error handling from the application that I am automating.

Improvements that can be made are: * It should be easier to automate tasks on a virtual machine that uses a different environment altogether. * The AA portal should not give us pop-ups every time a bot agent is updated. * Ease of debugging & inbuilt debug messages can be improved to help find relevant bugs easily. In the next release, they should add the Tableau tool as a package since most organizations use it for reporting & analytical purposes. Useful actions would be: * Opening & closing tableau * Downloading sheet data in Excel * Refreshing extracts * Publishing Tableau

Commands in Excel, Outlook, and Word automation are very limited and hence facing difficulties automating complex requirements for the above applications with V11 version.

Cloud-Based architecture is what we expect. Training is good and interactive but the final certification exam is very tough and it requires in-depth practical knowledge. I think the process design flow should be simpler than the present feature. Nothing much, but requirements keep adding with complexity, so automation becomes complex for now. That should be one more area of improvement.

In the Universal Recorder, we face minor bugs in A2019. For example, the browser closes and using the recorder. There are some minor bugs in the universal browser. In cases where Microsoft Silverlight is used, it doesn't capture the button. In V11 we use OCR, it captures the image and displays the text it captured. However, in A2019, it only captures and does not display the text. In A2019 it does not display the exact running status, but rather it displays the previous one. In V11, we used to add images in email message boxes with the current date and time but in A2019, we are unable to do so

As a developer, I would like to have copy commands available from one bot to another. It is a tedious task to write the same snippet of code in different bots again and again, whereas I could simply copy and paste the patch of code, like in the older versions. As a business user, I would like to have a feature wherein the bot is run on demand, whenever an email with a specific keyword or whenever a specific person sends an email to the bot's email address. Thereby, I need not worry about setting up a schedule in the WebCR.

When we think from a business perspective, business applications are more compatible with their specific browsers. Let's say one of my customers is using Firefox, which is the most compatible browser for their application, when we try to automate that with AA, we don't get accurate and stable results. They need to make the AA stable across all browsers and I hope to see it fixed in the next version. As I mentioned, if we don't close an Excel file in a safe manner, then when we try to open it or another Excel file in the same place, most of the time it will lead to issues. As we are working with unattended automation most of the time, no one will be available to take care of those issues when they happen

I feel the tool has to provide deeper insights for debugging issues, considering both internal and external factors. The image recognition functionality needs to improve so that we can work faster.

It would be great if they provide installation documents that are easier to understand, place more focus on capturing the fields, and most importantly, concentrate more on the OCR capability. Lots of customers come with scanned PDFs, wherein we find that area is more challenging. If a constant solution can be provided to read the non-editable documents, then that would be the highest milestone of the Automation Anywhere. Lots of companies do not follow the LEAN method, so most of the processes are still with the old models. AA can focus on those areas and introduce some techniques to address those issues within the processes. They can conduct more regular sessions with partners about their ability and new developments, which will help us in bringing new businesses.

The starting price, which is a one-off fee is a bit high and this may deter mid and small-sized companies from acquiring and decide to shun the platform. It ought to be broken down into monthly installments, where the billing of using the platform is done monthly. This will increase its absorption in the market. The vendor should increase the training and other engagements with users before they acquire the platform, as this will simplify its usage further and ensure that there no hindrances in using the platform.

Automation Anywhere can be improved in certain areas specified in the cognitive zone where the information needs better OCR Engine + Machine Learning capabilities. Also, they can improve on the System Identified region function of the IQ Bot - Our team faced a tough time in handling that as we were not able to assign variable to System Identified Region as the IQ Bot tool wasn't allowing it. Also, we have had a certain issue while performing the WLM - Workload Management functionality, applying Queue mechanism becomes hard sometimes - Can be more intuitive for the end-users.

1. Accuracy to process handwritten documents. 2. Should add more Analytics and Intelligence related capabilities. 3. Scalability along with the volume and business should be more flexible. 4. Cognitive capabilities should be improved more. 5. Large scale robot deployment is limited. 6. Licensing costs should be reduced. 7. Error handling should be improved more. As AA has recently moved to Cloud architecture, there will still be a lot of additions and improvements in terms of the features and offering and this will be evolved over the period of time only. About the exact performance on the cloud maybe we have to wait a bit more time and should evaluate once it will get settle down more.

* Cloud API vision and OCR engine integration should be more effective. * Auto-update of the Bot agent in runtime machines from Automation Anywhere control room server. * The import and export of the previous version bots to the latest version of A2019 should be more flexible and friendly for the end business users. * AI Sense recorder should be upgraded with additional features for better results. * SMTP mail features should come with migration options. All kind of VB scripts and Java scripts which we built using exiting version should support in this version.

They need to concentrate lot on a nonpersistent RPA model. Integrate IQ bot with AA instead of making it as a separate component, since nowadays intelligent bots need to be integrated into RPA core. Instead of bot agents getting installed on the machines, concentrate on making it independent of the system and only as a plugin in the browser. It doesn't have an independent small install for developers and always requires to be fully installed. Bringing a DevOps model for bot implementation integrated through private bot store might be a good idea to improve the tool.

Additional features should involve the Cognitive Section where we need more Advance solutions involving ML & AI. We have entered into the Cognitive zone where our solutions are much more advanced in nature due to the complexity involved in the Use Cases. Structured Data require a higher level of data analysis and grouping. We also recommend Automation Anywhere to start incorporating Plugin with Open Source Softwares so that we are able to build robust solutions - presently custom scripting is limited. The automation team can also explore the Oil & Gas sector as a target sector as this Industry have lots of potential and they need to foray in the Digital world in the near future.

We need more commands for PDF integration to make it more flexible.

A Cloud-based version of this solution would reduce dependence on architecture. Better use case management to prevent each development from scratch would be an improvement.

Whatever I was thinking for version 11.3, it's being implemented in the A2019. For example, it is great that the product will be: * Integrating with cognitive analytics. * Integrating with Azure. * I can write scripts. In version 11.3, if I want to write a Python script, then I write an ESX file. This is gone in version A2019.

We have in-house, a few variables, which we use from technical perspectives. We don't have them in Automation Anywhere, but they introduced them yesterday. I had a word with an Executive Officer, and he told me that they took all this into consideration and developed it.

I am looking for artificial intelligence and machine learning. I hope that they introduce them in A2019. I'm looking forward to what will be there in A2019 because that's the area that we need to go forward. We are looking for Automation Anywhere to put up their efforts to make it easier by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning. Along with RPA, this would make our automation journey very easy. We can bring more processes into automation, that's where I am looking for automation to focus on.

There is a small thing from a development point of view. There should be a static site box for finding any command if I am writing a code. If there are hundreds of functions, you can only scroll up and down to find one each one. There should be a site box where we can find the commands and easily use them. In the new version, they have included a flow chart instruction. This should be easily removed by mouse cursor. It's basically no problem; like we have to always use keyboard or mouse. This should be independent since we are either using a mouse or keyboard. This should be running smoothly. These are very small things which need to be improved.

I face little challenges when I move code to production. In Automation Anywhere 11.3, when the bot is running until it loops 24/7 in my development and UAT environment, we don't have our antivirus on it. When it comes over to production, there is an antivirus running on it. However, we don't know what time it will be scheduled. My client is taking care of that. So, when I raise a ticket with Automation Anywhere, they share some suggested documents to exclude those lists from antivirus. When I approach my client, they want to exclude those things because they are treating them as maybe not secure. What I am suggesting, when using A2019, if there are any additional features to exclude those antivirus scans until after my task is completed, then the antivirus can start scheduling. Then, I can easily tell the client that the priority are running and the Automation Anywhere scans can wait until after the release. I had a chance in Intellect Design Arena to go from installation to deployment. This was the first process with RPA in Intellect Design Arena, so people were thinking it's the first project that we have with Automation Anywhere. However, we are very experienced and can automate nearly anything.

I would like to have reading from a handwritten text, which they are bringing in the next version. That will be a good thing.

We face some issues, but we can’t prove them again. They occurred sometimes, but don’t occur again. For example, I record a video when a bot is running, and it is working fine. Another time it is not working. We face issues with Excel file creation. I’m trying to create a file in Excel .xls. It is getting corrupted. In these type of scenarios, I am not able to prove the issue from my end. I give suggestions as a developer, and these are in the notes, and I have already raised a ticket. I got information from the support team as well.

IQ Bot is the primary reason that we are using this. We are the one who started using this sometime back. What I realized is that it is just a product that came to be into existence. There are a lot of things that can be improved with a lot of scope. We are already engage with Automation Anywhere, giving our feedback, so they can improve. For example, they can improve the scope of extractions. IQ Bot does have some limitations. We have received assurances that in future releases this problem will be solved, and we should be able to do more extractions based upon future releases.

The new version 6.5 has come [out]. They are still working on the handwritten format — they want to get more accuracy in handwritten forms, which might take some time. It's everywhere, because the algorithms are evolving and the technology is only going to become more and more accurate. That is one area where we are really looking forward to understanding how IQ Bot can really leverage handwritten forms and also make significant progress into what could be called the "untouched places" at the moment - as far as rural India is concerned.

An interesting thing: If you look at AA, the OCR capability is actually from a third-party. They don't have their own OCR in there. They use ABBYY or Tesseract. They should have their own engine built-in with their own IP. It increases the value rather than trying to use a third-party solution. That's where I see a lot of value.

Some things that I do not see as of today are interactive chat or video interface. These are things that I will look for in future. I saw something like picture recognition, but something like a video or voice recognition is something that I'm looking for in the Automation Anywhere platform as an end user and even as a reseller.

If it is in the cloud, then you have a lot of scope of doing it even faster because you spend a lot of time in installation of virtual machines (VMs) alone. So, they are coming out with that, which is good. I believe that if there is some functional expertise within the organization, this helps in improving the process timelines even more because our current architects are totally IT-based. If they have some functionalities, that would help in automating processes faster. If we want automate some Automation Anywhere processes, we have to do it from scratch. If they are already there, we can use and scale them, then when can customize them. This is something worth thinking about.

There are a couple of features that I would like AA to improve upon in their next releases. One is the PDF automation. Of course, AA has come up IQ Bot which scans PDF documents. I feel that IQ Bot has not reached its mark. With financial and banking, we have multiple invoices that we have to process in our top use cases. Typically, these invoices come in a PDF file. So, PDF automation is the one automation that we want them to concentrate on. The second feature which I would like them to concentrate on is the work items concept. AA has come up with this in version 11, but I want them to more like competitors in the market for the next releases.

There are multiple features, like PDF integrations, which are coming up. Task-related features to PDF integrations are coming up nowadays, so people want those executed and improved a lot in Automation Anywhere. For improvement, I would like to see Automation Anywhere integrating with multiple other technologies. As of now, it is integrating with .NET. When it come to future technologies, I want Automation Anywhere to integrate with Python scripts, and make the execution easier. That will be very helpful, having our cognitive technologies interacting with Automation Anywhere.