What Robotic Process Automation (RPA) means in practice
Robotic Process Automation is software bots that execute rule-based business workflows by driving applications at the UI layer (screen scraping, click automation) or, where available, through APIs. RPA's strength is fast deployment against legacy systems that have no integration surface. Its weakness is that it only handles deterministic, structured work — it breaks on documents, on conversation, on judgement. The modern pattern is intelligent automation: RPA for the deterministic steps, IDP for the document steps, conversational AI for the customer-facing steps, and an agent for the routing between them. MindMap's RPA practice is built on UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and Power Automate with an AI overlay for the 70% of work pure RPA cannot touch.
Related terms
Intelligent automation →
The composition of RPA with AI components (IDP, conversational AI, ML classifiers) to handle workflows that mix structured and unstructured inputs.
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.
Bot (RPA bot) →
A single RPA process — typically scoped to one workflow or one application — that runs on a virtual desktop or server and executes a defined sequence of steps.
All 62 terms, in plain language
Sovereign AI, RAG, agentic AI, IDP, MLOps and the regulations that shape enterprise AI.