Robotics Process Automation
Robotic process automation (or RPA) is a form of business process
automation technology based on metaphorical software robots (bots)
or on artificial intelligence (AI)/digital workers. It is
sometimes referred to as software robotics.
In traditional workflow automation tools, a software developer
produces a list of actions to automate a task and interface to the
back-end system using internal application programming interfaces
(APIs) or dedicated scripting language. In contrast, RPA systems
develop the action list by watching the user perform that task in
the application's graphical user interface (GUI), and then perform
the automation by repeating those tasks directly in the GUI.
RPA tools have strong technical similarities to graphical user
interface testing tools. These tools also automate interactions
with the GUI, and often do so by repeating a set of demonstration
actions performed by a user. RPA tools differ from such systems
that allow data to be handled in and between multiple
applications, for instance, receiving email containing an invoice,
extracting the data, and then typing that into a bookkeeping
system.Apart from IT Industry, others making use of RPA currently: