3 Common Robotic Process Automation Challenges and How to Overcome Them

We explore the common robotic process automation (RPA) challenges that organizations face when programs stall and quick wins run out. Learn how to evolve your RPA program by integrating AI, expanding use cases, and focusing on measurable business value. Discover how to overcome today’s automation roadblocks and reenergize your strategy for long-term success.

In brief:

• Common robotic process automation challenges often cause programs to stall after initial successes, making it hard for teams to show ongoing value.
• Modern RPA platforms now integrate AI and machine learning, enabling self-healing bots and reducing downtime.
• Change fatigue and user adoption are critical challenges. Clearly communicating automation’s benefits and purpose helps reduce resistance.
• Engaging business users and encouraging them to actively participate is essential for successful RPA implementation.
• Expanding use cases and focusing on measurable business value can reenergize RPA strategies for long-term success.

Organizations originally launched robotic process automation (RPA) programs with great momentum and achieved quick wins. Now, as automations mature, these programs have stalled, and teams struggle to demonstrate continued value.

What makes RPA challenges different today?

“RPA is really the same. Businesses still have processes and are still using systems that require RPA to connect them,” says Nick Rahn, senior manager at Centric Consulting. “Today, there are various methods for creating and managing automations in RPA, along with the inclusion of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.”

Modern platforms have advanced beyond the early days of simple task bots. Today, self-healing bots use AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities to monitor automations for anomalies, predict potential failures, and fix automations in real time. This reduces downtime and minimizes the need for human intervention.

Natural language processing (NLP) enables vibe coding, in which you describe in simple language what you want the robotic process automation bot to do on a webpage. Then you allow a computer use agent or UI agent to run the actual mouse-clicking and keyboard navigation.

With its ease of use and quick return on investment (ROI), companies quickly adopted process automation. But now, their RPA programs simply aren’t meeting their expectations. We share three ways to overcome your current robotic process automation challenges.

3 Common Robotic Process Automation Challenges

1. Change Fatigue and User Adoption

To overcome RPA implementation challenges, organizations must address two crucial obstacles: change fatigue and user adoption.

Business users are essential to a successful RPA program. Even if they aren’t building bots, users should be excited to raise ideas, eager to improve processes, and committed to supporting automation efforts. Your program depends on it.

Here’s how to combat change fatigue and drive adoption:

• Invest in Business Engagement to Reduce Resistance to Change: Change fatigue often stems from ambiguous communication about why the automation is being implemented. Have direct conversations to explain the “how” of RPA and the “why,” including specific benefits they will directly experience. When users understand the business use case for RPA solutions, their resistance decreases and adoption increases.
• Train Users to Spot Good Ideas and Build Adoption Confidence: Front-line business users are your best source of automation ideas. But without proper guidance, the quality and quantity of opportunities they can generate is limited. If you train users to assess their own processes, they will gain confidence and are more likely to support process automation changes.
• Encourage Business Ownership: When business users view RPA as an information technology (IT) initiative, they are unlikely to support automations in production. Instead, require users to take ownership of their automations and business outcomes. This creates accountability and personal investment in the RPA implementation’s success.
• Empower Citizen Developers: If automation delivery is slow, change fatigue increases as teams grow impatient. Consider a citizen developer model where they can build their own automation. Provide informal training to nontechnical team members on using RPA development tools, enable the supporting technology, and provide central oversight for quality and security.

2. RPA Maintenance Overhead and Integration Gaps

“Understanding how these technologies interact with your organization’s existing software base is important,” Rahn says. “Can I use an application programming interface (API)? Is the data in the cloud? Do I have to augment the data?”

These foundational questions determine whether your RPA solution will scale or not.

Integration gaps, such as legacy applications or APIs, can lead to scalability limitations and require manual maintenance, thereby driving maintenance costs as well. Without proper RPA integration planning, your organization risks adopting automations that break at every connected system change. This breakdown can affect adoption and confidence in RPA processes.

As the number of automations grows, so too does the effort to maintain them. This is natural and expected — until the burden becomes too great. Don’t wait until it’s too late, or you might end up drowning in support tickets, forced to add resources that cut into the program’s overall value, or worse.

Here’s how to avoid costly maintenance overhead and integration gaps:

• Build Resilient Automation: When RPA code doesn’t follow best practices, automations are breakable, hard to debug, and require lots of handholding. Defining and enforcing code standards helps reduce this burden. This may include detailed logging and error handling, shared workflow components, or dynamic, easy-to-change configuration values.
• Choose the Right Processes: Just because you can automate with RPA doesn’t mean you should. Instead, be diligent and select only meaningful business processes to automate to avoid maintenance headaches in the future. For example, we once had a client whose RPA team settled on a process for their proof of concept that was easy to build but also very low impact. It resulted in automation they released and had to keep maintaining, even though it wasn’t adding business value.
• Qualify Change Requests: Once a bot is live, business users are likely to ask, “What if the bot could also….?” Make sure to strategically prioritize change requests alongside other initiatives and don’t drop everything to address minor fixes. In some cases, it may even make sense to turn off automation — and swallow your collective RPA pride — rather than complete required updates.

3. The Dreaded Robotic Process Automation Plateau

As Rahn explains, many organizations hit an ROI plateau because their robotic process automation challenges stem from the same core obstacles — identifying the right use cases, establishing governance, managing access to data, addressing change fatigue, and ensuring scalability beyond initial pilots. These RPA challenges often arise when programs struggle to expand and gain momentum.

To move past plateaus, your organization must revisit its automation strategy by stepping back to reevaluate business goals and priorities rather than pursuing isolated process wins.

Organizations need to determine if what they really want is to automate a process or try fixing it through other means, such as operational excellence or new technology. This is when you can choose to refocus strategies that reenergize your RPA programs.

If your organization does automate, it must determine which processes will be impacted by the newfound speed and scale. For example, other teams may need to grow to shift their workload. Your organization will also need to decide if the company is using the right RPA technology to solve this business problem.

Perhaps the most pervasive challenge facing robotic process automation programs is maintaining a healthy pipeline of automation ideas. Obvious use cases are often picked off early, leaving your team to scrounge for candidates after an initial RPA boom. So, what do you do when your backlog is ebbing? Try these tactics:

• Focus on Human-Centered Automation: Organizations need to remember that automation succeeds when it empowers people, not replaces them. Engage teams in generating ideas and prioritizing automations that improve their workload to keep fresh RPA process ideas flowing. This also builds trust and adoption across departments, leading to long-term RPA growth.
• Take a Process-First Approach: When guided by a narrow, tool-driven mindset, RPA teams can be like a hammer looking for nails to hit. To avoid excluding ideas that aren’t a strict RPA fit, shift your mentality to a broader, business value-driven approach. This means looking at processes on their own and assessing the potential gains from improvement without focusing on solutions. The result may not always be RPA automation, but you’re still likely to find RPA opportunities and almost certain to improve business processes.
• Add AI Capabilities: RPA is powerful but can’t automate most processes from start to finish. Rather than pick and choose parts of a process to inject task automation into, you can augment your solutions with AI-based capabilities — like ML and intelligent document processing — that excel at the subjective tasks RPA can’t address. Like peanut butter and chocolate, AI and RPA tools work better together— a partnership that, as Forbes reports, is helping organizations make faster, smarter decisions across industries. According to RPA platform UiPath’s analysis, combining AI with RPA helps organizations manage unstructured data, make complex decisions, and automate processes that previously needed human decision-making. These RPA tools are more powerful and accessible than ever, unlocking more intelligent automation opportunities while creating better end-to-end solutions.
• Use Data-Driven Process Discovery: If your business users struggle to identify good use cases or submit low-value ideas, consider automated discovery tools like process mining or task mining to uncover opportunities with high business value. These tools read actual data from teams performing day-to-day processes, then surface insights that can highlight bottlenecks and make a strong business case for automation.

Don’t Just Automate Stuff to Overcome RPA Challenges

A recurring theme you may have noticed is “Don’t just automate stuff!” That probably seems obvious, but too often the pressure to demonstrate RPA’s value leads to quick wins that don’t last and bot quantity over quality.

We often say, “Automating a bad process just gets you bad results faster,” which RPA can enable when not wielded properly. Instead, we encourage a measured approach to how, where, and when you employ RPA tools. Keep short-term benefits in context, and don’t wait to build the solid foundation needed for a scalable and sustainable program.

Technology has advanced significantly. New RPA platforms offer self-healing capabilities, AI integration, and natural language interfaces, making automation more powerful than ever. According to recent industry analysis, organizations are finding renewed success by combining RPA with AI capabilities.

Understanding how RPA and AI agents unlock business process potential can help you build a sustainable, high-value automation program. However, knowing which business processes are ready for RPA bots is only part of the solution. Successful automation requires careful planning. Before deploying bots, consider the key factors that impact implementation and determine any underlying issues that need to be addressed.

Measure value realization, not bot count. Establish clear and measurable metrics tied to business outcomes, including cost savings, cycle time reduction, error reduction/elimination, and employee time freed for strategic work.

These are the true measurements of successful intelligent automation, rather than counting deployed bots. Understanding value realization helps you prioritize current and future RPA tools and justify financial investment in your robotic process automation program.

Ultimately, there are many strategies that your RPA program can benefit from, regardless of size or maturity. And no matter where you are in your journey, it’s never too late to adjust your approach.

Ready to reenergize your RPA program? Our enterprise automation experts are ready to help you get started. Let’s talk