A Chat with Terry Walby, CEO at Blue Prism Ventures

Blue Prism is a global leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), founded by David Moss and Alastair Bathgate in 2001.

Blue Prism was born out of the then-unmet need to automate organisational processes and free up people for more fulfilling work. We grew from one client – UK bank, Barclays – to a global giant spanning almost every industry from financial services through the public sector to healthcare, with 2,000 users across 120 countries in 70 industry sectors.

How was the idea for Blue Prism conceived?

The founders noticed how business leaders were yearning to self-serve. They also saw how technology departments were cracking under the weight of demand. They were being shrunk down, outsourced, and offshored.

Blue Prism’s product portfolio was designed to ensure businesses realised their automation goals and achieved the best return on their investment. We decided to integrate other systems and data seamlessly and provide direct access to the latest artificial intelligence (AI). Blue Prism products put users on the fastest path to value from assessment and implementation to process analysis and lifecycle management.

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

The pandemic has highlighted the need for businesses to become more agile and resilient in times of great uncertainty. Blue Prism has always recognised the transformational potential of its intelligent automation (IA) technology, but the pandemic has heightened peoples’ awareness of just how powerful an ingredient it can be in achieving this.

Nowhere has felt the full force of the pandemic quite like the healthcare industry. In the NHS, for example, we helped by deploying intelligent digital workers across multiple functions, including patient pathways and the vaccine rollout. By taking on excessive and repetitive processes that ate up employees’ time, digital robots have enabled their human counterparts to give their attention to more value-added tasks. In the case of onboarding staff into the NHS, it meant that new nurses and other employees could be on wards quicker and thus providing a better patient experience throughout periods of the pandemic.

What this example shows is that intelligent automation isn’t just about time or cost savings, it’s about providing tangible business or organisational outcomes. No matter the industry, businesses should be using intelligent automation to target their overarching business goals, whether that’s improving customer or patient experience, increasing employee satisfaction, or boosting competitiveness.

As well as guiding countless businesses and organisations to a more productive and effective outcome throughout the pandemic, Blue Prism has been concentrating on making automation more available to all of its current and prospective customers. We have poured our efforts and resources into being able to offer the latest advancement in technologies, such as AI and machine learning, as well as securing key alliances with technology partners and industry-leading cloud providers.

What can we hope to see from Blue Prism in the future?

There is no doubt that we’ll see intelligent automation continue to gather momentum as more decision-makers realise the transformative power of intelligent automation.

The impact of human and digital workers seamlessly operating alongside one another is a powerful concept and one that will become more prevalent in the future. Intelligent automation will become increasingly strategic – more focused on critical corporate goals such as competitiveness, revenue growth, customer service and market growth.

Organisations will consider how IA can augment their human counterpart’s workload, enabling them to do more. Businesses will feel less limited by organisational constructs through completely reimagining processes with a digital-first mindset.