COVID-19 has had an era-defining impact on the automation industry. While 2020 produced few new technological or business developments – with company’s merely adapting to keep pace – it certainly highlighted the need for accelerated automation in 2021.

Unsurprisingly, 2021 will see a new and changed workplace, and technology will be needed to support it. Automation has been on the business agenda for years now, but as social distancing rules remain in place going into 2021, automation and robotics will likely become a core competence of multiple sectors in the foreseeable future. However, in an effort to push out automation during the pandemic, many businesses have found themselves patching failures that have arisen since.

In 2021, Forrester predicts that up to 30 per cent of businesses will ramp up their focus on quality by better planning and testing their automation before deploying it in production or exposing it to employees.