There’s a burn­ing ques­tion around SAP’s next move in automa­tion. The short answer is that it will be high­ly automated. 

As the trend toward soft­ware automa­tion takes shape in SAP’s devel­op­ment road map, SAP will like­ly embrace the oppor­tu­ni­ties that automa­tion gives us to con­nect users across dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions with­out the bur­den of APIs and oth­er ​“con­nec­tive tis­sue” forms of soft­ware engi­neer­ing. Automa­tion tech­nolo­gies today exist to learn from user (and machine) behav­ior, which means they can form new log­i­cal con­nec­tions with­out the need for com­plex script­ing and APIs. 

As described in ​“SAP Explains its For­ay into Robot­ic Process Automa­tion (RPA),” the bulk of tech­nolo­gies in this space grav­i­tate toward clas­si­fy­ing, record­ing, and mon­i­tor­ing data as it trav­els through work­flows inside appli­ca­tions and data­base oper­a­tions that form busi­ness process­es. Once record­ed and mon­i­tored, busi­ness process automa­tion can occur. A clas­sic RPA mod­el runs on a record, build, run, and mon­i­tor cycle. But where does it go from there? And where will SAP take it? 

Mak­ing Automa­tion Smarter