Whether or not you’ve heard of RPA – the acronym for ‘robotic process automation’ – this type of software application is almost certainly affecting the way you get your job done.
A bot, explains Lorne Gorber, Executive Vice President, Investor and Public Relations at CGI Inc. in Montreal, is “not R2-D2, but a piece of software that replaces the highly repeatable work that an individual used to do.” He says that of the array of technology tools IROs are using today, RPA is fairly simple and “would be at one end of a spectrum, while very deep, cognitive machine learning” would be at the other extreme.
Tony Abel, Managing Director at Protiviti, compares a robot in an RPA application to a “digital employee.” He defines RPA as “the automation of manual tasks that would have otherwise been performed by a human employee, using available applications.” He emphasizes that a bot might use the same user interfaces, the same access controls, and would execute the same points and clicks as its flesh-and-blood counterpart.
Pankaj Bakshi, CIO and Co-Founder of Toronto-based RpaBotPro, describes the RPA industry as just four years old and growing fast. What’s more, experts expect this growth to continue. A February 2020 report by Grand View Research, Inc. predicts that the global RPA market will reach US$10.7 billion by 2027, with expansion at a compound annual growth rate of 33.6% from 2020 to 2027.
IROs are just starting to catch on. For Gorber, not only is RPA part of his company’s offerings, but it’s something he uses in his capacity as IRO. “I’m now using a bot to push out stock quotes and certain other things on my website,” he explains, “and it takes away a little sweat equity from what used to be the case.”
Other examples of bots that IROs might be using are chatbots that direct individual investors to the right information source. Even an application as simple as an email out-of-office message set to send between certain dates is likely a bot in action.
Why Use RPA?
If bots do nothing more than mimic human activity, why would companies want to use them?
In a 2019 Protiviti survey, Taking RPA to the Next Level, some of the biggest benefits according to financial services companies were increased productivity (19%), stronger competitive market position (18%), higher customer satisfaction (12%) and better quality and greater employee satisfaction from elimination of mundane tasks (each noted by 11%).
Bakshi points out that having a software application complete rules-based tasks that have traditionally been done manually means that these tasks can be done in one-twentieth the time or less – and with far greater accuracy.
“Accuracy is one of the big, nonquantifiable benefits that come out of RPA,” says Satheesh Sanmugananthan, National Robotic & Intelligent Automation Lead for Deloitte in Canada. “If you train a bot the right way, it will never make a mistake unless the training was wrong.”
Gorber illustrates the point this way: When an IRO puts together quarterly results, quantities of different documents are involved. New document preparation tools rely on bots that can take a single updated number and ensure that number is revised throughout all relevant documents. “It’s a big deal if you have to put out a corrected press release,” says Gorber. “So, technology reduces the time to tick and tie every number and the integrity of the numbers is much higher.”
One reason why RPA has caught on so quickly is that security concerns are minimal. That’s because bots are relatively small pieces of software that reside on the user interface and generally do not pose a security risk.
In addition, an RPA solution can be implemented quickly. Sanmugananthan estimates than an RPA implementation can take as little as a week, and even an ambitious project generally requires no more than six-to-eight weeks.
Communicating in a Bot-Driven World
“Even if you’re not using RPA, it’s still relevant because your investors are using it,” says Gorber. He points out that in today’s capital markets as much trading is done by machines as by people. That means that an IRO’s messaging must land well with bots, as well as with human readers.
It’s an open secret that news desks generating headlines from earnings releases rely heavily on bots to do what is high volume and repeatable work. Software programs can search out revenue, growth and EPS numbers from an earnings release and then spit out headlines based on how much the numbers have changed.
“Knowing about RPA and knowing the impact of RPA is extremely important for an IRO today,” says Gorber. “You have to know that when an earnings release goes out, the first reaction to it and the first headlines are driven by RPA…The fast money guys employ all sorts of digital tools to help them in their analyses of companies.”
Gorber says that the rise of bots means that IROs should express themselves in plain English in all releases. He also notes that bots used by newsrooms, hedge funds, and institutional investors typically rely on algorithms that gauge sentiment. He therefore argues that it’s more important than ever that IROs write in ways that are not easily misconstrued.
Freeing Up Time for Strategy
One of the biggest knocks on RPA is that its main purpose is to reduce headcount, costing employees’ jobs.
Protiviti’s Abel argues that the reality is more nuanced. When “people get concerned that technology is going to eliminate jobs, perhaps that lower-end job will be gone but that frees up employees to do something more strategic,” he says.
In IR, the best arguments in favour of RPA may revolve around greater productivity within shrinking teams. In CIRI’s latest Investor Relations Compensation and Responsibilities Survey, the average IR department size was 1.86 people, down slightly from 2.0 in 2014.
In addition, even the largest Canadian companies are seeing their IR teams do more with less. For Canadian issuers with a market cap over $5 billion, 57% report having three or more full-time professionals, an 8% decrease from 2014. While IROs are gaining recognition through loftier titles and higher compensation, the day-to-day reality is that their workloads are growing.
“You don’t have all the time to do what you want to do because you’re always being reactive to requests to mail something or doing repeatable things like updating a presentation,” says Gorber. “RPA frees up time. It allows investor relations to be more strategic and proactive with slim resources.
Being awash in data also poses a problem for IROs. Gorber hopes that RPA, machine learning, and other forms of AI might help IROs find and focus on the most important data. For instance, he notes that he can now rapidly research what questions buy- and sell-side analysts have asked his peer group over the past four quarters about a development like digitization, completing this task in the time it would take to do a Google search. The same project would have taken him days to accomplish without technology – if it could be done at all.
“What’s important to remember is how awash in data we all are, and we need to employ technology that can help us focus on the right data,” he says.
Unlike in other professions, where a repetitive task is the job, experts suggest that IROs have little to fear from bots taking over their roles.
“Luckily, with something like IR, there are enough twists and turns and requirements that every call is not the same. Every day is not the same,” says Gorber. “In the corporate world, there’s not going to be an RPO, if you will, replacing an IRO.”
Looking to an AI Future
Bots may sound futuristic, but the experts insist that they are simply a first foray into an AI world.
Protiviti’s Abel points out that his firm, which specializes in audit, technology, and business consulting, is now referring more frequently to IPA – or intelligent process automation – than RPA. “We’re moving towards a combination of rules-based, scripted RPA with an integration of AI-type things like machine learning and natural language processing,” he explains.
Bakshi says that if AI is a flying car, RPA is the Tesla, something that’s readily available and working well. “AI is something that will come in one-to-three years, but it’s not necessarily at a level where you can commercially use it and say, ‘Yes, it will do everything that I want it to do.’”
Sanmugananthan agrees. “Generally,” he says, “organizations start with RPA solutions and quickly pivot to how can they inject AI to do the remaining percent of operations where they could not use RPA.”
Gorber also sees RPA as a stepping stone when it comes to introducing AI to investor relations. The next step, he suggests, might be a virtual IR assistant that could serve as a real-time data hub for investors, especially retail investors. “Investor relations teams really need to adapt to the speed that investors have come to expect to get information,” he emphasizes. “It’s about being proactive instead of reactive.”
Bots and the early manifestations of AI are “becoming a part of our lives,” concludes Gorber. “On the one hand, people in our profession should be comforted that an IRO is not going to be replaced by a bot. However, IROs need to be masters of what’s going on and rapidly adapt.”