Inside the Air Force's RPA Roadshow

Walk into one of our roadshows and you won't find a room full of software engineers. You'll find security forces, finance clerks, unit deployment managers, and personnelists — people whose days are eaten by the same repetitive, rule-based tasks over and over. By the end of the week, many of them have built a working bot.

That's the whole point. Robotic Process Automation doesn't require a programming language or a computer-science degree. With the Department of the Air Force's approved UiPath toolset, an Airman can take an existing template, tweak a few steps, and hand a routine task off to software that does it faster and more accurately than a person ever could.

The citizen-developer model

The roadshow is built so participants can start with little to no knowledge of automation. Over four days, they move from "what is a bot" to building a prototype tied to a real problem in their own work center — unit deployment reports, training trackers, awards documentation, data entry into enterprise systems. Through breakout sessions and one-on-ones with our RPA experts, the ideas turn into something they can actually take home.

The philosophy is simple: the people closest to the work know best where the friction is. Give them the tools and a little coaching, and they become automation owners — not dependent on a contractor or a central IT shop to solve every small inefficiency.

"If it's highly repetitive and boring, there's a good chance we can teach a robot to do those things. Airmen have a lot on their plate, and time can be used more efficiently."

Why it's a force multiplier

Every hour a bot reclaims is an hour an Airman or Guardian spends on work that actually needs a human — judgment, problem-solving, mission readiness. Multiply that across thousands of trained citizen developers and the effect compounds. Some of the automations built in these sessions have scaled far beyond a single office, spreading across entire functional communities.

The numbers tell the story: across the program, we've trained more than 6,000 personnel and supported over 1,000 automations across 100+ installations. But the more durable outcome is cultural — a workforce that looks at a tedious process and instinctively asks, "could a bot do this?"

From roadshow to sustained capability

A roadshow is a spark, not the whole fire. The lasting value comes from what happens after: communities of practice, office hours, certifications, and the resources that keep new developers building long after the week ends. Automation isn't a one-time event — it's a capability an organization grows.

That's how we measure success. Not by the bots we build, but by the ones our students build after we leave.