Abstract:
Digital transformation has impacted most industries over the past few years, and the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020-2022 and the rapid growth of interest in artificial intelligence – driven by availability of ChatGPT to a wide community of users – have further accelerated these transformation efforts. This transformation is understood as a fundamental reshaping of how companies operate due to digital technologies affecting both their processes and business models (Berman 2012). This leads to a significant increase in the performance of their business processes. According to L. Day-Yang, C. Shou-Wei and C. Tzu-Chuan, digital transformation affects three areas of functioning of organizations:
- customer experience – understanding customer needs, introducing multiple contact channels and self-service elements,
- internal operational processes – improving workflows, optimizing working environment, deploying performance monitoring mechanisms,
- operating model – changes in the products and services offered and the markets served (Day-Yang et al. 2005).
To date, a number of academic studies explored the topic of digital transformation from various perspectives: technological, organizational, and human resource management. Over the past few years, the development and use of software robots, the tools referred to as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), have gained considerable popularity – both from an implementation and research perspective. Just a few years ago, it was widely assumed that the use of RPA solutions will accelerate the changes in employment structure. In particular, use of software robots in industries such as banking, insurance and advanced business services (BPO and SSC) will ‘cannibalize’ the traditional ways of doing business (Hallikainen et al. 2018). On one hand, there will be a shift of employees to more advanced tasks providing higher added value, but on the other, a significant part of the workforce would need retraining (Anagnoste 2017).
