I work in the insurance and tax domains. The purpose of my using the tool is for user story creation and to have a traceability matrix for our development team and testing team.
The team I am working with was never into Agile before. We have a daily scrum-call and before that, we have to define all the tasks that we are going to work on for a number of sprints. For example, there is a Product Increment Planning meeting where we put all the user requirements into the product backlog. Then we put them back to the respective sprints.
A product increment consists of about five iterations, or five sprints. And we pull each of these backlog items to these particular sprints or iterations, so that it is easy for the development team to pick up, based on the priority. The backlog is set, and it is pulled into particular sprints, based on business priority.
So it helps the development team to take up and finish tasks within the required timeframe. It helps in productivity, traceability, and saves time.
The beauty of ARD is that it allows you to do both. If you want to do direct automation, you can put automated scripts directly behind building blocks, as you build a model (for instance, we tried Selenium scripts). On the other hand, if you want to start with manual tests, you can generate manual test cases from the model first and then automated them.