5 Truths RPA Vendors Won’t Tell You 

Choosing the right RPA vendor isn’t simple. While RPA vendors often promise fast implementation and effortless scaling, the reality for business and IT leaders can be far more complex. This guide uncovers five critical truths RPA vendors won’t tell you — helping you make smarter automation decisions, avoid hidden costs and set your organization up for long-term success.

In brief:

• RPA is a powerful tool, but implementing RPA solutions is not as simple as vendors often claim.
• Process discovery is an important part of RPA implementation, because not all processes are good candidates for rules-based automation. Working through how employees do their work will help identify the most eligible processes.
• RPA is almost always faster than humans, but it will pause if it encounters obstacles. However, unlike a human, it will keep trying to perform its task until the obstacle clears.
• Adding bots to processes doesn’t always improve performance, but designing bots that can call to other bots when needed can help.
• Communication is the key to successful RPA implementation.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) may not be the silver bullet its vendors would like you to believe, but it certainly is a piece that you want in your holster.

Many years ago, “screen scraping” was the answer to all our automation woes. We would spend hours creating an automation solution to pull down a few fields from screens, just so we could cut and paste that information onto our workstation for manual follow-up.

Years later, we began to develop application program interfaces (APIs) so we could integrate with existing systems. Once again, we were scraping data, but we now had some logic behind the process to perform a higher level of integration, including the real-time update of those integrated systems.

Still, it took time to create those APIs, especially if they were not part of the application package. And with the APIs arose issues of testing, application availability, rapid changes to the integration app and more.

That brings us to today and RPA. It seems that I cannot pick up a trade publication (yes, I am old, and I still like to hold a magazine in my hand) without hearing about RPA, AI, or machine learning (ML).

As RPA tools evolve, many vendors are incorporating AI and generative AI capabilities to move beyond basic, rules-based automation. When applied effectively, these capabilities can support automations involving unstructured information, enhance decision-making, and enable more adaptive workflows.

This vision is the “be all and end all” of the RPA automation journey. Or so they would have you think.

Don’t get me wrong. Whether in the workplace, at school, or at home, RPA solutions are transforming our lives — but they may not be the magic solution that many vendors would lead you to think.

One reason: AI-enabled automation does not eliminate the need for oversight. To be successful over the long term and deliver sustained business value, your organization must invest in planning, data readiness, and governance to ensure these solutions scale responsibly without creating unnecessary complexity.

In fact, according to ScoopMarket, “Many organizations tend to underestimate the time and cost required for RPA implementation. With 63 percent of organizations found implementation took longer than expected and 37 percent experiencing higher-than-anticipated implementation costs.”

The gap between promise and reality is why selecting the right RPA vendor matters. Many organizations find RPA doesn’t deliver on vendor promises because vendors often oversimplify various challenges of automation. Tools are marketed as easy to deploy, quick to scale, and capable of running independently once configured. However, successful RPA requires technical expertise, disciplined process design, ongoing coordination with IT, and realistic expectations about performance and scalability.

For leaders evaluating RPA platforms, this is where you should slow down. Beyond the demos and lists of features, organizations need to understand what implementation really looks like, what internal capabilities RPA requires, and how the solution will scale in the future.

5 Robotic Process Automation Truths RPA Vendors Don’t Share

I see several issues taking place with RPA implementations  that RPA tool vendors may not—or will not—share with you. I’ve also seen several challenges arise during development that are not found during discovery.

I’ve distilled my experiences into five hard-won lessons below, using things I’ve heard from vendors, users, or clients as my launch pads. Any one of these lessons can make or break an RPA initiative.

1. “Building RPA bots is so easy. Anyone can do it.”

I have never heard a vendor say the opposite—that building bots is not easy and that it requires unique skill sets—but that’s the truth. You will hear that the vendor’s solution is just “drag and drop” and does not require an extensive skill set, but don’t be fooled: This is technical work and requires design experience and technical acumen.

Does this mean that a business user could not do the work? No, but someone who has development and design experience will deliver a more robust product than someone who does not have the skill set.

Beyond technical skills, successful implementations also require thoughtful change management. Bots don’t just replace clicks—they change how work gets done. Users need to trust automation and know when and how to intervene in cases of exceptions. Without that preparation, even a well-built automation can struggle to gain adoption.

2. “That’s how I run through my business process each and every day.”

You may hear this from your users and, for the most part, it’s an accurate statement. What they don’t share are the nuances they encounter as they run through their process and the “shortcuts” they may take to complete their work.

You must remember that every bot is like a “new hire,” performing the same role as someone sitting at a desk. The bot needs to know as much as it can about the process and even the little nuances users encounter.

Will you catch every little piece? Absolutely not.

But going into your process discovery sessions with the user knowing that you need to “dig a little deeper” will help to uncover most of those items that can fall outside of the rules-based mentality of robotic process automation.

This is why upfront discovery and analysis are crucial for success. Processes that are highly variable, exception-driven, or dependent on human judgment may not be ideal for RPA. The most suitable use cases tend to be fixed, rules-based processes with clearly defined inputs and outputs.

3. “My RPA solution is slower than I expected. What’s up with that?

Just because a bot is now executing your workflow, it may not always run faster than a human.

Most of the time it will, but you’ll have occasions when it seems to run slower. That is normal. Once again, remember that the RPA bot is executing steps just like a human would, and just like a human, they’ll encounter issues outside of their control — such as a website that’s down, internal outages, system upgrades, and more.

What a bot can do for you, though, is continually check to see when services are available so they can resume the business process.

Usually, human operators end up doing other things while they wait, and it could be hours before they come back to complete their work. A robot, though, may have completed that same work hours ago.

4. “Let’s throw another RPA bot at our workflow to improve the performance!”

I like to use the analogy that you cannot take nine women and have a baby in one month. That’s not how it works. Same thing with a bot. Just because you throw another bot at a workflow or business process does not necessarily mean it will run faster.

But if you design your automation correctly, you can have bots call other bots to perform other pieces of the process. In essence, this provides a certain level of parallelism that you might need for your automation to be more successful.

5. “The RPA tool isn’t working. It looks like someone made changes to the application we are integrating with.”

Communication, communication, communication! There tends to be little communication at the outset of an RPA initiative, but that quickly becomes an issue when the bots are no longer running as expected or at all.

You need a great deal of communication between the teams building the bots and the teams who maintain and update the applications, websites, and directories that the bot needs to integrate with.

The RPA team cannot manage things in a silo, nor can the application and infrastructure teams. They must work as a cohesive unit.

Over time, many organizations formalize this collaboration through an automation Center of Excellence (COE). A COE can help define ownership, establish training standards, and ensure both business and IT teams are aligned on priorities, governance, and long-term automation goals.

Find the Right Automation Solution and the Right RPA Vendor

As you conduct your RPA vendor evaluations, ask the right questions to uncover gaps that demos don’t reveal. Some questions to consider include:

• What is your pricing structure and licensing model as automation scales? Cost is another common area of disappointment. Licensing fees, infrastructure requirements, maintenance, and the need for skilled resources can add up quickly. Seek to understand all costs, including license fees, support, training, scalability, and any additional charges—so there are no surprises after the pilot phase.
• How will your solution integrate with our existing IT infrastructure and business processes? Ask about compatibility with legacy systems, APIs, exception handling, and the level of customization or process redesign required.
• How do you manage ongoing maintenance, upgrades, governance, and scalability? Successful RPA isn’t just about rollout. Ask how upgrades, bot management, and enterprise growth will be handled over time.
• What security and compliance features are built into your platform? Ensuring adherence to data protection and industry regulations from the outset will help your organization avoid risks as automation evolves and matures.

Evaluating RPA solutions goes beyond pricing and feature checklists. The right choice supports your organization’s broader business strategy, complements your automation maturity, and can evolve with your organization.

You’ll hear several comments, suggestions and complaints as you begin to roll out your RPA initiative. (Doesn’t that usually hold true for almost all technology initiatives?) However, don’t let that discourage you from moving forward. RPA plays an important role in your organization’s automation maturity  and in your overall process excellence  initiatives.

Make sure you do your research and clearly engage staff from across the enterprise to help move automation forward. Don’t allow the naysayers to slow down your progress.

Instead, get them on board. Bring them into the process early so they can become more educated on why RPA is good for them and their company. Give them enough ammunition so they can effectively champion your RPA efforts and help to increase revenues, improve data and process quality, and enrich your customer and employee experience.

So, while RPA may not be the “silver bullet” of technology solutions, it certainly is a piece that you want in your holster. If designed for long-term growth, it can have you shooting for the stars.