The Death of RPA, Fundraising Benchmarks, AGI Timelines, and How to Ship

It's easy to want the results. It's harder to pay the costs.

Good morning

Back to the previous schedule and on to some new exciting stuff. As we wrap up 2024, as I do every year, there will be more about current and 2025 trends in coming editions.

In today's edition, among other things:

• The Death of RPA

• State of European Tech 2024

• Startups Fundraising Benchmarks

• AGI Timelines

• The Role of Humans in an AI-Driven Talent Acquisition Process

• How to Ship

• The Future of Programming

• State of AI Agents

Onwards!

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The Death of RPA

From 2010 to 2020+, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) dominated the conversation about process automation at companies. The sales pitch worked: software (non-AI) would handle repetitive computer tasks, letting employees focus on more important work. Companies spent billions. But then AI happened.

RPA is software that replicates human actions on computer systems. It creates programs (often called "bots") that perform the same repetitive tasks that office workers do every day. Here's what RPA bots actually do:

• Click buttons and fill forms

• Copy and paste data between applications

• Read and process structured data from documents

• Navigate between different software applications

• Follow precise, predefined rules to complete tasks

• Work 24/7 without breaks or errors

Think of RPA as a virtual workforce that sits at virtual computers, using the same interfaces that human employees use. For example, an RPA bot might:

1. Log into an email system

2. Download attachments from specific senders

3. Extract data from these attachments

4. Input this data into an enterprise system

5. Send confirmation emails once complete

Companies adopted RPA because it automated tasks without needing to change their existing software systems. The most common uses include:

• Data entry and validation

• Legacy system integration

• Report generation and distribution

• Invoice processing

• Employee onboarding documentation

• Claims processing

• Customer record updates

Major players like UiPath rode this wave to billion-dollar valuations, promising to deliver a "fully automated enterprise." The technology gained massive adoption because it could provide quick wins without requiring massive IT overhauls.

While RPA proved valuable for many organizations, its fundamental limitations became increasingly apparent: limited scope and capability, high maintenance requirements, implementation challenges, scalability issues etc.

The emergence of LLMs and advanced AI has quickly changed the automation landscape. Unlike traditional RPA, AI-powered automation can:

• Understand Context: Process unstructured data and adapt to changing conditions

• Make Decisions: Apply judgment to handle edge cases and variations

• Learn and Improve: Get better at tasks over time through continuous learning

• Handle Complex Tasks: Take on sophisticated processes that require understanding and reasoning

• Work More Independently: Operate with less human oversight and intervention

Here’s more from a16z:

Instead of hard-coding each deterministic step in a process, AI agents will instead be prompted with an end goal (e.g., book an appointment for the customer, transfer data from this document into this database), and then be empowered with the right tooling and context to take those actions on behalf of the company. They’ll be adaptable to various data inputs and capable of handling changes in business processes. And because of this flexibility, they will be far easier to implement and maintain than traditional RPA systems.

And the market is already growing:

It’s a shift from a bot-driven process that requires explicit programming of every step to AI automation that can be given high-level goals and figured out the steps.

This doesn't mean the end of automation - the opposite. It means almost everything can and will be automated with a power grab opportunity for companies that will question how they work sooner than others.

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State of European Tech 2024