According to the survey commissioned by SAIO*, only 30 percent of respondents said that repetitive office tasks take them less than an hour. 41 percent indicated that they lose up to three hours a day on such work. Nearly one in five (19 percent) admitted spending between 3 and 5 hours daily on these tasks, while one in ten said as much as 5 to 7 hours—almost an entire workday.

Among the most tedious tasks performed by employees of Polish and international companies, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) experts point to, among others: entering data into company systems, sorting and responding to emails, filling out documents, creating reports, or managing invoices. According to them, the answer may be the wider adoption of business robots from the RPA sector in Polish companies.

“Let’s remember that companies process enormous amounts of documents and data, the collection and analysis of which is not only time-consuming but also extremely tedious. Unfortunately, this often ends up with employees filling out hundreds of spreadsheets, which not only reduces job satisfaction but makes people fed up with work itself,” says Przemysław Lewicki, CEO of SAIO SA. “Automating these tasks, in cooperation with artificial intelligence, can finally deal with these challenges in a simple way. Very often, we hear from our clients that they’ve been waiting for years for solutions that would help them quickly improve processes that couldn’t previously be automated, which is why they kept hiring more people in finance, HR, logistics, customer service, or other departments,” Lewicki adds.

Polish companies still know little about business robots. In the West, it’s almost standard

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) makes it possible to automate repetitive tasks performed on a computer by mimicking the way people work. It is currently one of the fastest-growing IT sectors, and an integral part of business strategies for many corporations as well as medium and small companies. It saves time and costs related to processes that take humans several times longer than a robot—or that people cannot perform at all due to their complexity. While in 2021 the RPA sector was valued at $2.4 billion, in 2024 it is expected to reach nearly $5 billion globally. At the same time, thanks to automation, employees can fully control the deployment and operation of a bot that performs repetitive tasks for them automatically, often without involving the IT department. Importantly, business robots also eliminate human errors, and implementation time is sometimes just two to three weeks.

Meanwhile, in the survey commissioned by SAIO, as many as 40 percent of respondents admitted they had never heard of RPA systems. At the same time, more than half of those already familiar with the term (51 percent) said that introducing automation would (or already had, if implemented) strengthen the company’s competitiveness and improve employee satisfaction.

Office workers are not afraid of artificial intelligence

Many RPA technologies are based on artificial intelligence. As SAIO experts emphasize, AI opens up entirely new opportunities for businesses to analyze unstructured documents in Polish (or any other language AI supports). These so-called generative models allow surprisingly efficient work with the Polish language, including analyzing documents such as legal agreements or commercial contracts. According to specialists, this shows that artificial intelligence in business should not be feared but rather wisely incorporated into corporate strategies.

The fact that employees themselves are not afraid of AI in offices is also confirmed by SAIO’s survey. When asked whether artificial intelligence (AI) would take over their jobs in the next 5 years, as many as 70 percent of respondents said no.

“Our research results clearly show that employees spend a lot of time each day on repetitive computer tasks, which can easily lead to dissatisfaction and even burnout. That’s why both automation and artificial intelligence in business should not be feared, but used wisely to improve our daily operations and thereby increase company competitiveness. This is certainly why the process automation industry, combining RPA and AI, is developing so rapidly year after year and has already become an integral part of companies’ strategies worldwide,” concludes Przemysław Lewicki, CEO of SAIO SA.

* Survey conducted among managers and employees of Polish companies by Business Insider at SAIO’s request, July 28 – August 6, 2023.