Automation Empire / EP2 – Streamlining Export / Tutorial Mini-Series
Automation Anywhere raises $290 million at a $6.8 billion valuation
Robotic process automation, or bots that can be programmed to perform tedious and mundane tasks, is undergoing a period of explosive growth. One of the incumbents in the space is Automation Anywhere, which in the roughly 16 years since its founding has attracted over 3,500 customers in more than 90 countries, among them LinkedIn, MasterCard, Comcast, Hitachi, Stanley Black & Decker, IBM, Cisco, Symantic, Juniper Networks, Tesco, Unilever, Volkswagen, Whirlpool, Quest Diagnostics, Deloitte, Boston Scientific, Dell EMC, Accenture, Cognizent, Siemens, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and The World Bank. Automation Anywhere today announced that it’s raised $290 million in series B funding at a post-money valuation of $6.8 billion. Salesforce Ventures led the round with additional contributions from existing investors, including Softbank Investment Advisers and Goldman Sachs, bringing Automation Anywhere’s total raised to date to $840 million a year after the firm secured $550 million from SoftBank Investment Advisers, General Atlantic, Goldman Sachs, NEA, World Innovation Lab, and Workday Ventures. CEO and cofounder Mihir Shukla said the fresh funds will help Automation Anywhere realize its vision of empowering customers to automate end-to-end workflows and advance its focus on improving human-to-bot collaboration.
Automation Anywhere’s platform employs software robots that make processes self-running in a range of industries, including financial services, healthcare, insurance, life sciences, manufacturing, and telecommunications. The company’s spotlight solutions are IQ Bot, which learns by observing human behavior, and the Automation Anywhere Bot Store, a marketplace of prebuilt bots for common tasks. Automation Anywhere says that most customers automate 70% of repetitive tasks within four weeks. Automation Anywhere competes with heavyweights in a market that’s anticipated to be worth $3.97 billion by 2025, according to Grand View Research. In April, UiPath nabbed $568 million at a $7 billion valuation for its suite of AI-imbued process automation tools, while rival Kryon in February secured $40 million.
Elsewhere, Softmotive raised a $25 million tranche from a host of investors, shortly ahead of Automation Hero’s $14.5 million raise in March. Investors like Salesforce Service Cloud executive vice president and general manager Bill Patterson believe Automation Anywhere has the momentum – Automation Anywhere’s customers have deployed 1.6 million bots to date – to stand out from the crowd.
Automation Guild 2020
Discover the fundamentals of big data, why is automation important and some design patterns. In this session, you’ll learn What makes big data different, What does a sample data pipeline look like, How to test a data pipeline, Why data quality is important and how to manage it and Reference architecture to build an automation framework for data quality checks. In today’s world, most backend architectures have hundreds if not thousands of microservices talking to each other on a regular basis. Keeping track of changes in these API’s to identify what is a breaking change before finding it out in a production deployment is essential to business success. In this session discover: What is contract testing, Why contract testing is more beneficial than writing Integration tests, what is a Consumer, Provider and their states, Understand how to implement a basic contract test using popular PACT library with Java, and Best practices while implementing your own contract tests.
Noemi will show you some cool examples of things that you might be doing day to day manually that could be automated, including texts, phone calls, documents, and other tasks… which she hopes will inspire you and make you more effective while putting a smile in your face. TBA. Grow Your Automation Toolkit: Because when all you have is a hammer… – João Farias. Every day new tools to develop software appear, aimed at simplifying or expanding the capacity of developers.
Traditional tools such as unit test frameworks and end-to-end functional testing tools are now complemented by a myriad of new tools and techniques: Consumer-Driven Contract Testing, Visual Testing, Frontend Testing, Service Testing, etc. In this talk, João will walk through how to refactor end-to-end functional tests, written in Selenium, using tools with more specific goals, such as Pact, SpringBoot Test, Ember Testing, and Percy; explaining the pros and cons of each tool. In the end, you’ll be ready to improve our testing strategy using these tools – bringing more value for your companies and more productivity for every engineer involved in a project.
Artificial intelligence is coming for knowledge workers
New data suggests white-collar workers – even those whose work presumes more analytic thinking, higher paychecks, and relative job security – may not be safe from the relentless drumbeat of automation. The scope of jobs potentially impacted by AI reaches far beyond white-collar jobs like telemarketing, a field that has already been decimated by bots, into jobs previously thought to be squarely in the province of humans: knowledge workers like chemical engineers, physicists, and market-research analysts. The new research looks at the overlap between the subject-noun pairs in AI patents and job descriptions to see which jobs are most likely to be affected by AI technology. The findings have generally been most damning for lower-wage, lower-education workers, where robotics and software have often eliminated part or all of certain jobs. The specter of increased automation has raised concerns about how large swaths of Americans will be able to support themselves when their jobs become mechanized and whether the loss of low-income jobs will increase wealth inequality.
One’s actual job is not wholly defined by the text of the original job description. The Stanford study also doesn’t say whether these workers will actually lose their jobs, only that their work could be impacted. For what it’s worth, market-research analysts seem to think many elements of their jobs can’t be done by using artificial intelligence. What market research analysts say Nearly 700,000 people in the US work as market-research analysts, people who study market conditions to sell products or services, and their job growth outlook for the next decade is much higher than average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Market-research analysts have already begun to contend with AI in their jobs, but so far it’s been used to assist their work or free them to do other tasks.
Webb’s data shows that not every aspect of market research analysts’ jobs fall under AI patents. Jim Loretta, a qualitative-research consultant based in Miami, Florida, emphasized the human element of his job: the importance of conducting surveys and other market research in person.
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