Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Last Updated: July 29, 2026 | By Mihail Sebastian | AI Dictionary
Software that automates repetitive, rule-based digital tasks by reproducing the clicks and keystrokes a person would make across business applications.
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is software that automates repetitive, rule-based digital tasks by reproducing the clicks, keystrokes, and copy-paste steps a person would perform across applications. Despite the name, no robots are involved, and in its standard form no AI either: an RPA bot follows fixed rules and never learns.
That matters because RPA is routinely marketed as AI. It automates work well, but it is closer to a very disciplined macro than to a system that perceives and decides, like an AI agent.
How RPA Works
A developer records or scripts a workflow: open this mailbox, download the attachment, read the field in this position, paste the value into that form. The RPA bot then replays the workflow through the applications’ user interfaces or APIs, exactly as written, as many times as needed.
Bots run in two modes. Attended bots work alongside an employee, automating parts of a task on demand; unattended bots run whole processes on a schedule with no one watching.
The fixed-rule design is both the strength and the limit. A bot never gets bored or mistypes, but it breaks when a screen layout changes and has no judgment when a case falls outside its rules. Vendors now pair RPA with machine learning under the label “intelligent automation”: a model reads a messy scanned document, and the RPA bot moves the extracted data where it needs to go.
Example of RPA
An accounts-payable team receives hundreds of supplier invoices by email. An unattended RPA bot checks the mailbox every few minutes, downloads each PDF, and reads the invoice number, date, and amount from their fixed positions on the standard template.
It enters those values into the accounting system, matches the invoice against its purchase order, and posts it if the numbers agree. When they disagree (a price mismatch, an unknown supplier), it routes the invoice to a person. The bot absorbs the volume; humans keep the judgment calls.
Related AI terms: Bot · AI Agent · Expert System · Machine Learning
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Mihail Sebastian — Writes about AI governance, regulation, and the technology behind them. Placeholder bio — replace with a real credential line. About