Global robotic process automation (RPA) software revenue is projected to reach $2.9 billion in 2022, an increase of 19.5% from 2021, according to the latest forecast from Gartner.
“By achieving a growth rate of 31% in 2021, the RPA market grew well above the average worldwide software market growth rate of 16%,” said Cathy Tornbohm, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner. “Organizations are leveraging RPA to accelerate business process automation initiatives and digital transformation plans, linking their legacy nightmares to their digital dreams to improve operational efficiency.”
Although growing at a slower pace than previous years, the worldwide RPA software market is projected to continue to experience double-digit growth in 2023, growing 17.5% year over year (see Table 1).
RPA continues to be an attractive and high-growth market with vendors rapidly evolving their RPA offerings into a broader automation platform with embedded hyperautomation capabilities. As a starting point towards hyperautomation, organizations will increase their spending on RPA software solutions because they still have a lot of repetitive, manual work that through automation could free up employees’ time to focus on more strategic work.
“Competitive RPA vendors and many software vendors are pushing beyond a traditional single technology-focused offering to a more advanced suite of tools that encompasses low-code application platforms, process mining, task mining, decision modeling, iPaaS, computer vision, and IDP capabilities on top of their existing RPA offering. This allows them to offer, or rather makes them poised to offer, an all-encompassing hyperautomation-enabiling technology platform,” said Varsha Mehta, senior market research specialist at Gartner.
In fact, Gartner predicts that through 2024, the drive toward a state of hyperautomation will drive organizations to adopt at least three out of the 20 process-agnostic types of software that enable hyperautomation.
Regional Perspective
North America, Western Europe and Japan together are on pace to account for 77% of global RPA revenue market in 2022. North America will account for the largest revenue share at 48.5%, followed by Western Europe and Japan at 19% and 10%, respectively.