Interviews and Reviews

Intelligent Automation Services; Interview with Jukka Virkkunen, Co-Founder at Digital Workforce

Digital Workforce

Just recently, the intelligent automation service provider, Digital Workforce, was named a leader in the latest Forrester Wave™: Midsize RPA Services, after a detailed analysis of the 12 most significant service providers in this segment of the market. Partner and Co-Founder Jukka Virkkunen, tells us more about Digital Workforce in this interview with TechBullion.

Please tell us your name and about yourself? 

My name is Jukka Virkkunen, and I reside in downtown Helsinki. I have over 30 years of experience in IT and Technology.

The majority of that experience has been within the sales and marketing management teams of Fujitsu, Capgemini, and Basware. 

However, a few years ago, I decided to leave the IT industry and joined an international strategic consultancy firm as a Partner. However, I was drawn back into the world of IT because of my interest in RPA.

RPA is such a uniquely disruptive technology. Unlike any software or computing advances in the past twenty years, it has the power to redefine and positively impact human productivity and behaviours.

Arguably. RPA will play a leading role in the technological revolution – and will have a critical impact on the way we work.

In 2015, I founded Digital Workforce with my two co-founders because of the belief that RPA will offer a wealth of new opportunities for enterprises – automating process and time-intensive and thus freeing employees to focus on more strategic, creative, and valuable projects.

What is Digital Workforce? 

Digital Workforce enables large organisations to accelerate their digital transformation. From the very beginning, our mission has been to support enterprises as they automate knowledge work routines and empower people to take on more meaningful impact projects and tasks. 

Today, we are one of the largest pure-play hyper-automation companies in the global market. We have also built a unique cloud-based hyper-automation service powered by leading RPA and AI technologies.

Tell us more about the unique services and solutions you provide at Digital Workforce, who are your customers? 

From day one, we sought the opportunity to become the most disruptive automation service and cloud company in the market. 

For example, our automation services are highly productised and globally scalable.

In addition, our Service Management System is certified according to ISO/IEC 20000:1-2018 standard and is the only hyper-automation offering globally.  

In addition to this, our new product, Roboshore, is a game-changing solution within the RPA space. It is a turn-key service that allows large organisations to utilise RPA quickly and effectively. 

It is also a proper multi-vendor cloud solution that integrates with leading technology companies such as UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and MS Power Automation. 

The service includes process maintenance, licenses, new versions, backups, etc., all-in with pay as you go model, where every process has individual prices based on SLA priority level. 

Finally, we are working with some of the largest Nordic organisations and global brands, including Nasdaq.

What are digital workers, could you tell us more about this new trend of workers and what makes them special? 

Digital Worker is a Robotic Process Automation application that emulates human execution of repetitive processes on existing applications like ERPs. Digital Worker manipulates the presentation layer of an application in the same manner as a human does. In addition, Digital Worker interacts with any application without system modification or integration. So, in practise, Digital Worker can do mimic the same processes and behaviours as humans. However, Digital Workers is five to ten times faster than human being without the possibility of incurring errors.  

Digital Workers are becoming more intelligent and adopting various AI technologies. Digital Workers can today execute long end-to-end processes, including human-in-the-loop types of functionalities. 

Today, technology vendors bring more advanced AI components into Digital Workers to handle more complex processes and utilise unstructured business data in the automated process.  

Years ago, we predicted that every working team would have included a Digital Worker to perform the labour and time-intensive routine tasks. 

To our credit, this has now become a reality. We’ve seen many early adopters of this technology, particularly in the financial services sector.

The digital transformation trend is real, especially in 2021, could you give us a global statistical analysis of this market and the demand?

The COVID-19 pandemic is driving the adoption of automation with the digital transformation race. Lockdowns and remote work have accelerated every organisations need to ensure business continuity. We believe that even post COVID-19 will the speed and scale of digital transformation projects will increase exponentially. 

The RPA market is forecasted to grow at double-digit rates through 2024 despite economic pressures from COVID-19. In addition, HfS and KPMG have recently conducted CIO research, and AI and RPA are top-of-mind investment areas. 

Specifically, Gartner says that worldwide Robotic Process Automation software revenue will reach nearly $2 Billion in 2021. Based on Digital Workforce’s experience, the software represents roughly 10 % of the total market.   

Automation is fast gaining traction, how sustainable is this industry and what do we expect in the future? 

Robotic Process Automation is already a proven and mature technology. It is also one of the central technologies in the CIO’s toolbox and traditional system development and integration. RPA provides a cost-effective and quick tool to build interoperability between applications and enables users to automate and streamline end-to-end processes.  

At the moment, according to Gartner, “RPA is the fastest growing market in enterprise software: by using RPA, organizations can quickly accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, while unlocking the value associated with past technology investments.”

 Could you tell us more about robotic process automation and natural language processing at Digital workforce, how does it work? 

We have a comprehensive service for customers to start their automation journey and help them accelerate the process. 

Digital Workforce provides a full life-cycle journey to utilise the technology in admin and business processes. The journey starts at the design phase, where we help customers discover processes, make ROI calculations, and then define their automation roadmap. In this particular phase, we also help customers build their Center of Excellence team, their governance model and finally train them to work independently once they’ve been onboarded. 

Next is the Building phase, primarily about automating processes with proven methodologies and best practices to develop industrial production quality automation. The second to last phase is to operate, where Digital Workforce provides extensive cloud services. However, we also support on-premise or the customer’s cloud environments. The final phase – Maintain and Enhance – ensures that business continuity processes are in production and running smoothly. 

From our perspective, robotic process automation is one AI technology that we use in well-defined processes, and the data is structured. The majority of business data is still unstructured. We need other AI technologies like natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning to structure and classify the unstructured business data like invoices, orders and order confirmations, etc. Digital Workforce has a neural network-based AI service – Document as a Service for structuring and classifying the business data. 

Digital Workforce combines all AI technologies to provide end-to-end automation and increase the automation-rate in customers’ admin and business processes.

Digital workforce was recently named as a leader in midsize RPA services report by independent research firm, what does this mean for the company? 

We’re thrilled by the recognition, and this recognition demonstrates that we have been able to grow into a world-class organisation in just five years. We have an excellent team with a laser-focus on ensuring that our clients fully leverage the power and capabilities of our Digital Workers and cloud-based technologies.

Do you have any available opportunities for investors and partners at Digital Workforce?

 Digital Workforce has seen accelerated growth in large markets in the US, UK, and Europe, and we anticipate that we will double our revenue in the next two years. 

Do you have more information for our readers? 

For further reading, you can review the Digital Workforce website, which provides considerable information about RPA and other hyper-automation technologies.

For more information, visit the Digital Workforce website: https://digitalworkforce.com/

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