In our latest blog post, we caught up with Nick Proud, our Lead Developer. Nick looks after our development team and is responsible for delivering our customer engagements and our product roadmap. With a wealth of RPA experience, Nick’s been a fantastic addition to our team. Read on to find out why Nick joined NexBotix and why he’s excited about where the automation market is headed.
Where were you before NexBotix?
I was at Parker Software, a software house specializing in business process automation and live chat. I was Lead Dev on their automation product. Prior to that I have worked in the systems automation space, managing and writing software for server systems and networks.
Why did you join the NexBotix team?
The offering of a managed service for RPA was something that really excited me, having previously written automation software for exclusively for developers. The prospect of putting together a team and building a new platform also really excited me.
What excites you most about the NexBotix solution?
We are exploring new avenues of integration with Microsoft Azure, mainly with the ‘Form Recogniser’ OCR technology, which is allowing us to get instant, accurate extractions from pretty much any document we throw at it. The potential use-cases for this are pretty much endless. We’ve also built our platform in such a way that the gap between human and robot is bridged, which has been a lot of fun to develop.
What’s your favourite thing about working at NexBotix?
The freedom to explore new tech. We are setting the standard internally as a very open-minded team. I think it is crucial to nurture a culture of innovation and the fact that we have already begun to do that is my favourite thing about working here. Everybody is willing to try new things and ‘outside of the box’ thinking is always well-received.
Where do you see the RPA market in the next 5 years?
I think within five years we will see a significant increase in the presence of ‘RPA Champions’ within SMEs. For the past decade or so, RPA has been most prevalent within financial services. I think in the coming years, RPA will become more standardized within other sectors such as HR with use cases like employee on/offboarding and Customer Services with the growing use case being the use of Chatbots. Chatbots are still very much explicitly based on a set of human-defined rules, whereas in the coming years we should start to see them relying more on machine learning to formulate their responses.
What is the unique skill you bring to the NexBotix team?
I’m a keen problem-solver. In my previous automation work, I have had to work within very specific constraints like a specific customer environment for example. When you are working with these kinds of caveats, you sometimes need to be able to improvise your way to the solution. As a result, if we come across an automation obstacle, I’m usually pretty good at finding a workaround.
