"get rid of software that holds your data hostage" - that can easily take an order of magnitude more money and time to do than implementing a screen scraping solution as an integration workaround.
I've seen my share of software like that. "Getting rid" of it may be a valuable thing in some cases, but it's not something you do "first", it's a strategic decision with an organizational transformation that will definitely take years to suceed and may be fail or be cancelled; it's something you might start but you may as well move on to a different position before it's finished. On the other hand, RPA is something you may actually achieve yourself in a reasonable timeframe.
I've seen my share of software like that. "Getting rid" of it may be a valuable thing in some cases, but it's not something you do "first", it's a strategic decision with an organizational transformation that will definitely take years to suceed and may be fail or be cancelled; it's something you might start but you may as well move on to a different position before it's finished. On the other hand, RPA is something you may actually achieve yourself in a reasonable timeframe.