What digital workers are and why the market is growing fast

Digital workers help scale business processes that require accurate data and round-the-clock precision. They perform simple copy and paste work such as entering data into a system or extracting information from PDFs, emails and spreadsheets.

According to Grand View Research, the global RPA personnel will grow by 38% between now and 2030. In my role at OpenBots, I spent the past year talking to developers, partners, and automation leaders to understand the scale and current realities of digital workers.

By using multiple employees or a digital workforce, organizations can handle complex workflows for customer-facing and internal projects, where scaling is a shared theme across industries.

What is a Digital Worker?

A digital worker is a robotic process automation bot (RPA) that mimics human behavior and interactions on a computer, involving many applications, websites, and documents.

Traditional programmers and citizen developers build them using RPA tools available on intelligent automation platforms to perform manual, large-scale, and rules-based tasks.

Task automation using RPA is typically the first step in automating business processes. The next step is to add a layer of intelligent document processing that combines AI and machine learning (ML) to process documents.

How to build digital employees

You can build a digital worker from scratch after taking certified courses or watching tutorials at an RPA academy — many are free. It’s helpful to know some basic development concepts such as inputs, outputs, and parameters, but you’ll get started quickly if you’re new to RPA development.

Building a digital employee is easy if you have a development background or are tech savvy. There are affordable low-code platforms with hundreds of built-in commands to get you started. You can also extend the functionality by adding custom C# code or Python to your commands.

If you are in a leadership position, consider outsourcing development to an experienced automation partner with expertise in your industry. This ensures that you are focused on clear business objectives, while the partner has the technical know-how to build digital employees that align with your goals.

Why digital workers matter

Teams in the banking industry, and many others, rely on digital employees to grow their workforce. A notable example is KeyBank, which has a robust digital workforce to scale its processes. Without digital workers, they would undo hundreds of hours of work every week.

Tedious processes that follow strict rules, such as copying data to a system and verifying its correctness, are standard in back-office tasks. These kinds of tasks are essential for the functioning of a company, but that does not mean that a highly trained employee has to perform them.

People can only work a limited number of hours before they get tired and they don’t always complete tasks in the same way. Digital workers, on the other hand, execute rules-based processes without anomalies. This consistency translates into higher revenues, lower compliance costs and efficiency.

Working with a development partner

Organizations that are new to automation will have to compile their digital workforce themselves or have it made for them. Choosing a development partner offers immediate advantages. They can guide you to the best place to start and can develop a proof of concept for your first automation within weeks.

Digital workers can perform almost any task that a human worker can perform on a computer. Because it’s so broad on how to integrate, those who go the do-it-yourself route often get stuck in the analysis paralysis stage, not sure where to start.

A partner helps reduce focus on processes that deliver immediate ROI. The automations must make sense and also deliver results to justify their value. Working with a partner ensures they build a high-quality digital employee that meets your needs.

Build your own automations

If you are active, it may make sense to build an automation yourself. You are in the trenches and know processes that could benefit from automation. This path is ideal for people who enjoy learning new terminology and understanding its potential as they will become the champions of automation in their organization.

Courses will turn you into a proficient citizen developer and give you the foundation to create basic to medium digital workers. You will learn the basics of RPA in a few weeks. From there you will gain experience by extending bots, building, deploying and maintaining others.

Understand who updates and maintains your digital workforce. Having a simple change management process is also underestimated. Passwords change and programs need to be updated, taking a bot offline. Have a plan on who on your team will take responsibility for your digital workforce.

Prove it by testing

The digital workforce is still a relatively new concept. Even seasoned automation leaders with decades of experience still have to get used to it. Still, the ability to become more efficient and competitive is a theme that applies to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

The truth is, no one can tell you the exact ROI of adding a digital employee to your team. Through implementation, you will understand its impact on your business and your workforce. Like the KeyBank example, digital workers have become critical to their operations, but they had to prove it first.

There’s no reason to wait either. There are low-risk options for starting to build digital workers, and it’s not theory that will win the day, but testing fast, failing fast, and being open to change.

Jason Dzamba is director of media at OpenBots