Looking back at the RPA hype cycle
The last few days I've been going back through old emails and reviewing the year that has passed. I came across this email to the business sales account:
There's a lot of things I find amusing about this in retrospect. I immediately messaged a screenshot to a few friends who I knew would find this amusing1. What stands out most though is not even in the contents of the email but rather the context, from 2018 until 2021 or so I was frequently hearing about "Robotic process automation" or RPA as it was commonly called. Then something strange happened, I just stopped getting emails about RPA. The new business to business spam emails were all about machine learning, marketing, NFTs, crypto and the stonks market. Process automation still has a lot of value to organizations but its moment in the hype cycle spotlight appears to be over. The value delivered is now just going to be silently delivered in the background.
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I love the completely untargeted laundry list of job roles in this email, you can tell that the email was itself automated with an approach of sending out quantity rather than quality emails. In some senses it makes sense though considering the product advertised is basically an email list. ↩