The move towards using robotics in factories is not new. Even the use of bots to do back office tasks has been implemented in many industries in recent years. However bringing robots into offices is something that has primarily been driven - or at least accelerated by the pandemic. From cleaning to monitoring productivity, through to processing paperwork, more companies are taking a new look at robotics. While cost savings always figure in, a bigger reason now is business resiliency. <h3><b>Hitting the Pause Button</b></h3> Despite long term cost savings from automation, justifying the huge upfront capital outlays is not easy. Especially when technology is rapidly evolving, many of the suppliers of new technology are startups with no guarantee of whether they’ll be around to provide service a few years from now. <h3><b>Rising Implementations</b></h3> <b>Remote Monitoring.</b> Sometimes referred to as “pervasive sensing”, this technology combines AI and clever sensors. Drishti (USA), a startup, has come up with a way to apply artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision to analyse busy video streams of workers on assembly lines. This could be easily be applied to monitoring office workers. <b>Automating Paperwork.</b> UI Path (Romania), a startup pioneering the area, filed for an initial public offering in December valued at $20 billion. This month Workato (USA), said it has raised $110 million in fresh funding. <b>Collaborative Robotics.</b> Often called cobots, these machines are designed to work with people, rather than replace them. Firms such as GreyOrange and Amazon-owned Kiva are providing co-bots, mainly to power e-commerce warehouses, but that could be just the beginning. <b>Digitizing Value Chains.</b> Alibaba has taken the lead with its Xunxi. This involved digitising and integrating <i>whole value chains</i>—from product design, parts procurement and manufacturing to logistics and after-sales service. Merchants on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms can fulfil customised orders within days while eliminating excess inventory. Time from production to delivery was reduced from several months to a fortnight. While this might not be applicable to office work, some interation of the concept is likely to move past the manufacturing sector and into other areas of industry.