[burnte]

I was just involved in a $50k RPA project. We have an EMR that the buyer of our facilities wanted data from. The EMR vendor gave us two choices, a SQL dump of everything (which we took but would take many months to decode what tables did what, basically reverse engineer the storage process) or let them export the subset of data we needed. The first was free, the second was $60k and would take 6 months. Knowing that vendor, it would take closer to 9-12 due to how backed up they are and how bad they are at time estimation.

Enter a third party vendor I'd worked with before. They specialize in archiving data from EMRs into a standalone searchable database. $50k and two months, they're done. The EMR has an IE only UI, and a newer cross platform UI. We demonstrated how to extract the data required for the new owner, and they created an RPA workflow to "print" to PDF 5k medical records. It's the exact same output the EMR vendor would have given us, but they'd have used their own internal tools to do it, but they'd have taken 3-6 times longer to do it.

RPA is just screen scraping, basically, and sometimes it's still useful.

[honey-badger]

Precisely. In some narrowly defined scenarios where data migration is otherwise like untangling a giant ball of yarn, RPA serves an invaluable need. However, the manner in which it is marketed is out of proportion to the narrower scope in which it is valuable.

[burnte]

I could say that about every technology. :)