A survey seeking to understand the challenges users face with current RPA solutions has concluded that while RPA is a growing industry, 69% of respondents experience broken bots at least once per week.

While the number varies across industries, it is particularly high in healthcare (80%), finance (84%), and manufacturing (70%).

Almost half of those surveyed (41%) said it takes over 5 hours to fix a broken bot. However, some respondents noted it takes 24 hours or more to fix a broken bot – specifically in the healthcare (44%), finance (48%), and manufacturing (38%) industries.

Conducted online in May 2022, The State of RPA was undertaken for vendor Robocorp, and includes the perspectives and opinions of RPA users, specifically IT teams.

According to Gartner, robotic process automation (RPA) is the world's fastest-growing enterprise software segment.

The survey found RPA is a growing industry, with 67% of respondents investing in the technology in the past year. Further, 81% of respondents plan to invest in RPA in the next year.

Respondents reported a plethora of benefits from using RPA, including:

- Speed of task completion (35%)

- Handling of repetitive tasks (30%)

- Accuracy of task completion (26%)

Additionally, respondents reported varied reasons for investing in and using RPA, including:

- The ability to adapt current tech to meet evolving needs (34%)

- The ability to scale and meet evolving processing needs (22%)

However, 33% of respondents agreed that the primary reason to invest in more RPA is improved customer service to get up and running quickly.

Second, The State of RPA helped Robocorp to uncover several challenges users are facing with the technology:

- 69% of respondents experience broken bots at least once per week.

- 34% of respondents say the primary value of RPA during digital transformation is its ability to adapt current technology to meet evolving needs, while 22% say it's the ability to scale and meet evolving processing needs. That totals 56% of respondents who would benefit from the speed and flexibility of open-source RPA solutions, but 81% of respondents say half or less of their RPA technology is open source.

- 65% of respondents agree that they would benefit from usage-based pricing.