What Intelligent automation means in practice
Intelligent automation is the operating-model evolution of pure RPA: RPA handles the deterministic steps, but IDP handles the documents, conversational AI handles the customer interactions, and an agent or workflow engine handles the routing. The point is to address the 70% of back-office work that pure rules-only RPA cannot touch — invoice exceptions, claims triage, KYC validation, support escalations. MindMap will not sign a statement of work that depends on rules-only RPA for unstructured inputs; the deployment will fail within nine months and the customer's automation programme will stall. Intelligent automation is the only honest answer for the long tail of enterprise back-office work.
Related terms
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) →
Software bots that automate rule-based, repetitive workflows by interacting with applications the way a human user would — at the UI layer or through APIs.
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) →
End-to-end automation of document workflows: capture, classify, extract structured data, validate, route, and integrate into downstream systems.
Agentic AI →
Systems where an LLM acts as a planner that chooses tools, decomposes tasks, and iterates toward a goal rather than producing a single completion.
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All 62 terms, in plain language
Sovereign AI, RAG, agentic AI, IDP, MLOps and the regulations that shape enterprise AI.