To improve IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for the next release, there should be more integration with external systems, and more integration with IBM's data and AI platforms is needed. There is an AI part in IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for Machine Learning, but IBM has another platform specifically for data and AI, which is integrated right now. More features are hoped for in the future.
IBM BPM Developer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Nov 24, 2023
IBM’s support should improve response time. I have opened a ticket with the development team asking them to make RPA easy to work on by different users on the same virtual machine.
Chief Operating Officer at Anyrobotics RPA Experts
Real User
Aug 9, 2023
I would like to have more flexibility in connecting the platform with third-party systems. It is easy to connect IBM RPA with other IBM products, but it is complicated when connecting to non-IBM systems. So, I would like IBM RPA to be even more flexible in connecting to third-party systems.
Technical Lead | WDG projects at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Real User
Jul 7, 2023
The solution has to improve its features. The administration of the environment could be better. The users should be allowed to create folders in Control Center. Scheduling bots must be improved. The product does not provide an option to organize the scheduling bots in Control Center. It might be a little confusing if we use many bots. We don't have the option to put them in different folders. The logs in the solution could be better.
Learn what your peers think about IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
BDM at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Jun 7, 2023
There are certain limitations in the solution for screen reading. Certain times it cannot read a Microsoft screen, and this needs to be improved. Integration of IBM RPA with Microsoft needs to be enhanced. From time to time, the company has improved its features and package.
There are a few areas that could use improvement. Firstly, the cost of IBM RPA is high, especially here in Brazil. Additionally, it requires a good understanding of the technology to apply it effectively. Lastly, there are limited integrations with other systems, which could be improved.
We can use its inbuilt activities, and it's a complete package, but just like ElectroNeek, a limitation is that we have to depend on its inbuilt activities. We can't include our own activities or we can't introduce other activities. When it comes to deployment and scheduling bots, there are some conflicts. They are using Microsoft MQ to communicate with their bots, but it's not reliable. When we are scheduling time, if I need to schedule an interval of one minute, sometimes, the queue gets loaded with a lot of processes or bots, and they don't wait until the first one gets complete. So, that sort of disadvantage is there. I have found one bug in version 22 when sending or configuring mail. While using their orchestration environment, on IBM Server, you can configure an SMTP connection to send out the details you want. For example, when you create a user, they send out an email. That part didn't work, and I created a few tickets. The issue is that there's a typo in the endpoint API. They have probably corrected it in version 23.
The feature that I hope will be available in the next versions is the system role which gives users access to specific features, based on the assigned roles and the accessibility provided to the user. The benefits of creating roles include increased security through controlling users' access according to their specified roles. We would like a decreased need for customer support. We need easy and accurate monitoring of the use and access of data by higher management, leading to better research management. System roles are preconfigured with the permissions necessary to perform the tasks within the scope of that role. They cannot be modified or deleted.
The time it takes for approvals, and risk analysis could be faster. It's probably the main benefit you can get from the whole process. If it can do the tedious work quickly, employees with specialized skills can concentrate on the things that require deep knowledge or specialization. Then all the manual, repetitive tasks can be forwarded to automation. Integrating with artificial intelligence should be more mature and more complete. So far, it works, but there are still many more benefits that we can get with better integration with Watson. There are also some opportunities to improve the integration of documents in the workflow.
Senior IT & Business Consultant at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Dec 14, 2020
IBM should provide specific solutions for specific problems, like templates for invoicing processes, or general templates for creating efficient processes. Another good example would be to have a template for a credit onboarding process. This would give us something to show the client in terms of a working solution, and that we're not having to create something from scratch. The quality is great! It's very strong and has a very strong platform. However, you need to consider the clients and have a client perspective. From my point of view, the RPA from IBM is not yet in touch enough with the clients. They are not taking the client's perspective into consideration, and they don't guide them enough throughout their journey to RPA. They need to provide more guidance and more coaching. At the end of the day, it's a type of culture that they are trying to build within the company. I would like to see an interface that would help customers establish which process is suitable for RPA or not. Maybe some type of scoring process would be helpful in establishing the processing suitability for whether it is an RPA or not. That would be a great feature to consider.
Vice President - Digital Automation Services at Techvista Systems
Real User
Dec 7, 2020
The way the robots are being used actually. We need to design the robot to instantiate it based on some event or human intervention. If that can also be automated, that would be good. That would be an additional workflow completed. The next step after that would be to use the RPA service. Some things which require human intervention can also be automated using some decision management, based on rules. If there's a framework which does all of this part, that would be good I think. RPA should be configured as a part of business process management and built-in. For the user, it shouldn't matter if he is using RPA or he's using none of the automation. It should be seamless from their viewpoint. So they would just use drag and drop, choose the features they wanted, and that would be it. RPA and BPM in one solution and RPA encapsulated inside BPM. This RPA should be under the umbrella of BPM. This is what the future should be.
Senior Solution Engineer at Stream I.T. Consulting Ltd.
Reseller
Jun 17, 2020
Much like Automation Anywhere, it would be helpful if there was some sort of community board to help share and trade information to help users learn how to troubleshoot and learn about the various aspects of the solution. Right now, there isn't anything of that nature available to help users find answers. We're based in Thailand, but the documentation is not in Thai, which makes it difficult for us. If they could translate all of their documentation into our language, we'd be very grateful. The pricing of the solution is quite high.
Director of Cloud App Development at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jun 18, 2019
I would like more drag and drop type of features. If you look at some of the competition, they do provide that scalability feature, where a user who doesn't know anything about automation can work off of it using a bunch of drag and drop things. That is what our clients are looking for. I would like it to do pretty much everything out-of-the-box without any need for any customization. However, that is not the case right now. We absolutely have to do some amount of customization with the solution in order to use it out-of-the-box as-is.
Head of Process Innovation and Robotic Automation at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Oct 9, 2018
Extensibility is the key, especially in terms of the Recorders feature that we have. That should be browser independent. Enhance it, because some people have Chrome, some have Internet Explorer, etc. Allow it to be browser independent. Integration with PDFs: Not just the ability to read information from PDFs but the ability to write information from PDFs, make it secure, sign it, etc. An additional enhancement would be: How do you connect to your Microsoft Exchange Servers? Right now, the connection forces Microsoft Exchange to expose a port. Some enterprises are not allowed to expose a port, so it has to go through the firewall and security and token assessment. And that's another thing: If they can allow a token exchange inside the tool itself, that would help.
IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that encompasses the use of smart robots in any process requiring efficiency, consistency and speed, with no risk of mistakes. In a nutshell, RPA simulates a human user working.
Today, it is possible to automate processes through the use of digital robots, or bots, which execute pre-programed, repetitive tasks in a safe and mistake free manner. There are literally thousands of opportunities for Robotic Process Automation to make an impact...
To improve IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for the next release, there should be more integration with external systems, and more integration with IBM's data and AI platforms is needed. There is an AI part in IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for Machine Learning, but IBM has another platform specifically for data and AI, which is integrated right now. More features are hoped for in the future.
The pricing of IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) could be improved.
The product must be promoted more. There are no promotions.
IBM’s support should improve response time. I have opened a ticket with the development team asking them to make RPA easy to work on by different users on the same virtual machine.
I would like to have more flexibility in connecting the platform with third-party systems. It is easy to connect IBM RPA with other IBM products, but it is complicated when connecting to non-IBM systems. So, I would like IBM RPA to be even more flexible in connecting to third-party systems.
The solution has to improve its features. The administration of the environment could be better. The users should be allowed to create folders in Control Center. Scheduling bots must be improved. The product does not provide an option to organize the scheduling bots in Control Center. It might be a little confusing if we use many bots. We don't have the option to put them in different folders. The logs in the solution could be better.
There are certain limitations in the solution for screen reading. Certain times it cannot read a Microsoft screen, and this needs to be improved. Integration of IBM RPA with Microsoft needs to be enhanced. From time to time, the company has improved its features and package.
There are a few areas that could use improvement. Firstly, the cost of IBM RPA is high, especially here in Brazil. Additionally, it requires a good understanding of the technology to apply it effectively. Lastly, there are limited integrations with other systems, which could be improved.
We can use its inbuilt activities, and it's a complete package, but just like ElectroNeek, a limitation is that we have to depend on its inbuilt activities. We can't include our own activities or we can't introduce other activities. When it comes to deployment and scheduling bots, there are some conflicts. They are using Microsoft MQ to communicate with their bots, but it's not reliable. When we are scheduling time, if I need to schedule an interval of one minute, sometimes, the queue gets loaded with a lot of processes or bots, and they don't wait until the first one gets complete. So, that sort of disadvantage is there. I have found one bug in version 22 when sending or configuring mail. While using their orchestration environment, on IBM Server, you can configure an SMTP connection to send out the details you want. For example, when you create a user, they send out an email. That part didn't work, and I created a few tickets. The issue is that there's a typo in the endpoint API. They have probably corrected it in version 23.
The feature that I hope will be available in the next versions is the system role which gives users access to specific features, based on the assigned roles and the accessibility provided to the user. The benefits of creating roles include increased security through controlling users' access according to their specified roles. We would like a decreased need for customer support. We need easy and accurate monitoring of the use and access of data by higher management, leading to better research management. System roles are preconfigured with the permissions necessary to perform the tasks within the scope of that role. They cannot be modified or deleted.
Stability could be better. It also gets difficult with every new version of Java or every new version of Windows.
The time it takes for approvals, and risk analysis could be faster. It's probably the main benefit you can get from the whole process. If it can do the tedious work quickly, employees with specialized skills can concentrate on the things that require deep knowledge or specialization. Then all the manual, repetitive tasks can be forwarded to automation. Integrating with artificial intelligence should be more mature and more complete. So far, it works, but there are still many more benefits that we can get with better integration with Watson. There are also some opportunities to improve the integration of documents in the workflow.
IBM should provide specific solutions for specific problems, like templates for invoicing processes, or general templates for creating efficient processes. Another good example would be to have a template for a credit onboarding process. This would give us something to show the client in terms of a working solution, and that we're not having to create something from scratch. The quality is great! It's very strong and has a very strong platform. However, you need to consider the clients and have a client perspective. From my point of view, the RPA from IBM is not yet in touch enough with the clients. They are not taking the client's perspective into consideration, and they don't guide them enough throughout their journey to RPA. They need to provide more guidance and more coaching. At the end of the day, it's a type of culture that they are trying to build within the company. I would like to see an interface that would help customers establish which process is suitable for RPA or not. Maybe some type of scoring process would be helpful in establishing the processing suitability for whether it is an RPA or not. That would be a great feature to consider.
The way the robots are being used actually. We need to design the robot to instantiate it based on some event or human intervention. If that can also be automated, that would be good. That would be an additional workflow completed. The next step after that would be to use the RPA service. Some things which require human intervention can also be automated using some decision management, based on rules. If there's a framework which does all of this part, that would be good I think. RPA should be configured as a part of business process management and built-in. For the user, it shouldn't matter if he is using RPA or he's using none of the automation. It should be seamless from their viewpoint. So they would just use drag and drop, choose the features they wanted, and that would be it. RPA and BPM in one solution and RPA encapsulated inside BPM. This RPA should be under the umbrella of BPM. This is what the future should be.
Much like Automation Anywhere, it would be helpful if there was some sort of community board to help share and trade information to help users learn how to troubleshoot and learn about the various aspects of the solution. Right now, there isn't anything of that nature available to help users find answers. We're based in Thailand, but the documentation is not in Thai, which makes it difficult for us. If they could translate all of their documentation into our language, we'd be very grateful. The pricing of the solution is quite high.
I would like more drag and drop type of features. If you look at some of the competition, they do provide that scalability feature, where a user who doesn't know anything about automation can work off of it using a bunch of drag and drop things. That is what our clients are looking for. I would like it to do pretty much everything out-of-the-box without any need for any customization. However, that is not the case right now. We absolutely have to do some amount of customization with the solution in order to use it out-of-the-box as-is.
We are looking to see how it can connect with various interfaces seamlessly, through APIs.
Extensibility is the key, especially in terms of the Recorders feature that we have. That should be browser independent. Enhance it, because some people have Chrome, some have Internet Explorer, etc. Allow it to be browser independent. Integration with PDFs: Not just the ability to read information from PDFs but the ability to write information from PDFs, make it secure, sign it, etc. An additional enhancement would be: How do you connect to your Microsoft Exchange Servers? Right now, the connection forces Microsoft Exchange to expose a port. Some enterprises are not allowed to expose a port, so it has to go through the firewall and security and token assessment. And that's another thing: If they can allow a token exchange inside the tool itself, that would help.