It’s a macro you program to use it systems through the UI. People already mentioned blueprism, uipath and automationanywhere, there’s a few others.

It’s an immensely valuable digitization too in enterprise setups where you operate s lot of closed and/or legacy systems. Like we operate around 600 it systems, and very few of them talk to each other.

So if you want to transfer data from one system to another, you’d need to have someone manually do it. Or you could automate it by using RPA software.

Basically it’s what will do to the office space what the assembly lines did to factories.

It’s also really terrible, because it breaks when the UI changes. But when companies refuse to sell open apis, it’s what you have to work with. The most ironic part is the IT companies that now sell RPA solutions for their own shitty software, but that’s the world we live in.

Mostly screen scraping / macros. A lot of what I see is over marketed woo (“cognitive RPA”), but it’s basically a watered down version of selenium that (in theory) a programming novice could use to automate tasks.

The tricky part is that there is a finesse involved to make it reliable and the exercise becomes more process improvement than programming. Most people struggle with this and you end up with a 2000 line-of-code Rube Goldberg machine that always breaks.

Robotic Process Automation, usually being done via AutomationAnywhere, BluePrism and/or UiPath