Business process automation (BPA), also known as business automation, is the technology-enabled automation of business processes.[1]
Tool sets vary in ability, but there is an increasing trend towards the use of artificial intelligence technologies that can understand natural language and unstructured data sets, interact with human beings, and adapt to new types of problems without human-guided training.[2]
A business process management system is different from BPA. However, it is possible to build automation on the back of a BPM implementation. The actual tools to achieve this vary, from writing custom application code to using specialist BPA tools.[3]
See main article: Robotic process automation. The practice of performing robotic process automation (RPA) results in the deployment of attended or unattended software agents into an organization's environment. These software agents, or robots, are deployed to perform pre-defined structured and repetitive sets of business tasks or processes. The goal is for humans to focus on more productive tasks, while the software agents handle the repetitive ones.[4]
BPA providers tend to focus on different industry sectors but the underlying approach tends to be similar in that BPA providers will attempt to provide the shortest route to automation by interacting with the user interface rather than going into the application code or database behind it.[5]
Artificial intelligence software robots are deployed to handle unstructured data sets (like images, texts, audios) and are deployed after performing and deploying robotic process automation: They can, for instance, populate an automatic transcript from a video. The combination of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) brings autonomy for the robots, along with the capability in mastering cognitive tasks:[6] At this stage, the robot is able to learn and improve the processes by analyzing and adapting them.[7]