Thoughtful: Bespoke bots that work for less investment

Thoughtful provides a bot marketplace that orchestrates and executes production bots that perform frequently occurring business processes as a service, backed by an automation development environment for experienced developers to build and customize their own high-performance and low-maintenance RPA bots for clients.

There are two kinds of RPA bots in the world: Simple bots that replicate rote sequences of tasks on a user’s desktop, and bespoke bots that can functionally replace a complex process that may require human oversight. Thoughtful set out to create a ‘digital workforce’ rental service to encourage higher value from customized bots and reusable business process bots their community has created.

RPA can enable some great instant leaps in efficiency for many repetitive tasks. However, to alleviate real labor costs, the consulting labor cost of building and maintaining a bespoke bot in one of the market-leading RPA platforms can exceed the license cost of the bot by several orders of magnitude, easily breaking the $100K cost-per-bot threshold.

Thoughtful doesn’t need to compete with the enterprise-level RPA firms, or the many interesting entry-level and open-source automation tools on the market. They can fill a niche for mid-sized firms who need sophisticated custom automation that can be leanly developed and modularly improved, without the massive cost of entry and resource requirements.