Software robots to take on more work in Asia as Covid-19 accelerates demand for automation, says UiPath

After living through China’s recent Covid-19 outbreak, primary schoolteacher Cookie Shan now sets an alarm at 8am and 7pm each day to remind students in her WeChat class group that they need to fill in their daily health declaration forms, indicating if they have a raised temperature or dry cough, some of the key symptoms of the deadly disease.

“When the alarm rings I send a message to their parents to fill in the forms and if I don’t get a reply I call them,” said the 25 year-old, who lives in Zhejiang province in eastern China. “It’s annoying to remind them [every day].”

But this new daily exercise as a result of the recent health crisis is just one example of a wider trend as electronic processes – usually via a smartphone app or via a desktop PC – soak up more and more tasks that used to require people to fill out paper forms.

In fact, a major growth area for this kind of software – particularly in the legal and financial sectors – is what is known as robotic process automation (RPA), whereby software works as the ‘eyes and hands’ of a human by reading files and automatically inputting instructions via a keyboard.

Different from hardware robots, such as a robotic arm that serves drinks at a bar or an automatic mop that cleans floors, RPAs read documents and automatically input keyboard instructions – replacing repetitive, human labour in industries such as manufacturing, finance, consumer goods as well as in schools and hospitals.

“[During the pandemic] companies came to us … saying they were considering automation as an optional or desirable thing to have,” said Malina Platon, Asia Pacific managing director, strategic accounts, at New York-based UiPath in a recent interview with the Post. “They are looking for a technology that can help them in a critical situation.”