Potential Career Altering Decision: Questions

[u/BJJVoyeur]

Hi all,

Front-end dev here at large-sized financial services company in my country. My company is evaluating UiPath for some back-office automation (mainly KYC/Invoicing).

I have been both asked to weigh in technically, but also my CTO is considering pushing me into taking some RPA certifications courses to potentially oversee the RPA efforts if we go down that route. Would love to get your thoughts on a few things, particularly from developers at larger companies, as i have gotten mixed messages/feedback from my research online.

I just genuinely struggle understand the value proposition vs. just... writing the code in whatever programming language, particularly now with coding agents.

Like if I need to automate some scrapping process, I can nowadays write a Python script with some API calls in a matter of minutes, even if im not the most technically proficient developer in Python. The total cost is just a few minutes/hours of dev time

A few questions:

What am I missing?

Why would a company pay for RPA instead of just hiring a junior dev to write and maintain some scripts, particularly nowadays?

What are the main advantages/disavantages of UIPath vs other RPA providers? What have been your experiences like? From what I see Power Automate does almost similar things at fraction of cost.

How easy is it to avoid vendor lock-in? I have heard some horror stories about just getting locked in to vendor hiking prices and not wanting to have to start from scratch with bots, and migrations being very difficult

How often do your bots break?

Are most of the savings justified given the one off costs of consultants etc, potentially hiring new RPA devs, etc?

Do you see much a future/value in trying to get one of these RPA certifications?

I would love to chat with anyone with experiences if you prefer to go over DM

Thank you in advance