Your RPA Renewal Is Coming.
The Smartest Move Might Be to Cancel It.
Legacy RPA earned its place a decade ago. But most of the capability you are paying a premium for now lives inside the Microsoft stack you already own.
Most standalone RPA estates are performing to specification. Bots execute on schedule, finance receives its reconciliation on the second working day, and exception volumes remain within tolerance. In the majority of enterprises the estate has operated in this steady state for several years, generating no escalations and, consequently, no review. Which is precisely why the renewal may go through unexamined. Working fine is a low bar when you are paying rent on it.
What You Are Actually Renewing
When most organisations first adopted RPA, dedicated platforms were the pragmatic way to bolt automation onto systems that offered no other route in. A way to get software to click through a system that had no API, no integration path and no appetite from the vendor to build one. That was a real capability gap and the licence fee was a fair price for closing it.
That gap has largely closed. The clearest evidence is what Gartner did to the category itself: in October 2025 it published a first-of-its-kind Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies, assessing twenty platforms in a market it defines as unifying process orchestration, connectivity and agentic capability across the enterprise.
What that means in practice is the RPA tools you're paying a premium for are no longer justified, as the features are largely included in platforms you likely already own. And renewal is the only moment in the year when anyone in your organisation is contractually obliged to ask whether the thing is still worth what it costs.
Three Things Your Renewal Leaves Unquestioned
The verdict you made years ago
Somewhere in the original design there is a list of processes that "couldn't be done" any other way, so they went to RPA. Connector libraries have expanded enormously in the years since, past a thousand pre-built connectors on the Microsoft side alone, and many of those old verdicts are simply stale. Nobody revisits them, because revisiting them is not anybody's job.
The lift-and-shift instinct
When organisations do finally decide to move, the first plan is almost always to recreate what exists. As is. Same steps, same sequence, new platform. I understand the appeal; it looks like the lowest risk option. But it is also how you spend a migration budget to arrive at exactly the same process you had before, without any improvements in the process or implementation.
Maintenance versus improvement
It is important to look at the shape of the spend, not just the number. A standalone RPA estate typically carries licence fees, separate hosting, and a maintenance load that grows with every UI change upstream. That money buys continuity. It does not buy progress. When the platform cost falls away, the same budget should be invested into improving existing, and developing new, processes.
What a Real Reassessment Looks Like
Not an as-is migration. A review first. The better approach starts from the process, not the automation:
From our experience, around 90% of automation use cases can move into the Microsoft platform with improved, or no loss of, functionality. The standard and premium connector library has expanded significantly, which means capabilities that were genuinely ruled out a few years ago are now well within reach. A small number of true edge cases, very extensive screen or click-matching for instance, may still justify keeping a specialist RPA tool. Those cases are the exception, not the rule.
If deep process intelligence is your primary requirement, buy for that requirement and do not let anyone tell you the suite covers it. For most organisations a capable all-rounder platform that reaches into the tools your team already opens every morning usually beats a specialist that reaches into nothing else.
Think Through Who Gets to Build
The part that outlasts the cost saving is who ends up holding the capability. Standalone RPA concentrates automation in a small, specialised team, where every request becomes a ticket in a queue. Business units learn not to ask, and the automation backlog becomes a list of things nobody bothered to request.
Governed low-code changes the shape of that: the people closest to the friction can build, and central IT sets the guardrails, monitors what gets built and steps in where it matters. Add Copilot to that and the barrier drops again.
Where to Start
You don't need a multi-year programme to find out whether this applies to you. Start with a short conversation to establish whether your automation estate is a fit.
If it is, we can run an assessment, typically three to five days, across your existing RPA automations and the processes they touch. You get a targeted migration roadmap your team can keep and act on, whether or not you work with us to migrate.
The question isn't "how do we renew?" It's "should we?"
Decision Inc. is an advisory-led cloud & AI partner that works with over 300 organisations annually.
Before You Renew
Talk to us first. A short conversation can tell you whether your RPA estate is a candidate for migration, and what a better-performing, lower-cost automation model looks like on the platform your team already uses.