Fears of bots taking away jobs is unfounded, says Automation Anywhere

Robots and artificial intelligence have come a long way since Siri gave you advice on the best Japanese restaurants in your neighborhood.

That's pretty much the reason why there's an underlying fear about machines taking jobs away from humans. But Ankur Kothari, chief revenue officer and co-founder of Automation Anywhere, strongly believes that the recent technological advancements will actually create more jobs.

California-based Automation Anywhere develops robotic automation software to reduce time constraints and improve the efficiency of business processes.

Earlier this week, Automation Anywhere said it raised $250 million in what it called a series-A round, which valued it at $1.8 billion. Founded in 2003, the company has 1100 clients globally including Google , LinkedIn , Dell ,Cisco , Siemens and Indian techology firms such as Infosys and Wipro.

Speaking to CNBC-TV18, Kothari said the company's growth has doubled in the last few years and that it is poised to grow even faster going ahead.

Traditional process automation technologies are capable of automating only about 20 percent of an enterprise’s business processes, but with their intelligent digital workforce platform, companies can automate 8 out of the 10 business processes. The company has seen a 100 percent plus growth for the last few years, it is poised to grow even faster with the co having hit an inflection point in the past year.

The market opportunity is expanding exponentially. The robotic process automation, which is currently is multi billion market, is estimated to grow to $100 billion by 2025. The company will start using automation with the idea to improve productivity, which then helps in revenue maximization and improving customer satisfaction creating a hyper productive workforce.

The fear is unfounded. At the onset of new technology adoption there's fear and doubt, but history tells us technology revolutions actually create more jobs. The company has over 1000 clients globally and none of their clients have seen job losses due to bots.

Bots work alongside humans, doing the more routine repetitive work, which require a standard operating procedure, freeing up time for humans to do more interesting work. They target creating a bot economy - currently the size of the digital workforce is 600,000-700,000, the aim is it can hit 3 million by 2020, which would then make it the largest employer without actually having the employees on their payroll, quite like Uber.