Most of the things that RPA is used for can be easily scripted, e.g. download a form from one website, open up Adobe. There are a lot of startups that are trying to build agentic versions of RPA, I'm glad to see Anthropic is investing in it now too.
It's almost always a framework around existing tools like Selenium that you constantly have to fight against to get good results from. I was always left with the feeling that I could build something better myself just handrolling the scripts rather than using their frameworks.
Getting Claude integrated into the space is going to be a game changer.
Maybe Anthropic should focus on building a flexible RPA primitive we could use to make RPA workflows with, like for example extracting values from components that need scrolling, selecting values from long drop-down menus, or handling error messages under form fields.
> Most RPA work is in dealing with errors and exceptions, not the "happy path".
A human can work around all these error cases once she encounters them. Current RPA tools like Uipath or ui.vision need explicit programming for every potential situation. And I see no indication that Claude is doing any better than this.
For starters, for visual automation to work reliably the OCR quality needs to improve further and be 100% reliable. Even in that very basic "AI" area, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini are good, but not good enough yet.
I know we're still a bit far from there, but I don't see a particular hurdle that strikes me as requiring novel research.
UI is now much more accessible as API. I hope we don’t start seeing captcha like behaviour in desktop or web software.
I don't think there will be a very big place for standalone next gen RPA pure plays. it makes sense that companies that are trying to deliver value would implement capabilities this. Over time, I expect some conventions/specs will emerge. Either Apple/Google or Anthropic/OpenAI are likely to come up with an implementation that everyone aligns on
In other words, I agree
You realize this means '100 times better', right?
100 times better seems to me in line with the bet that's justifying $250B per annum in Cap Ex (just among hyperscalers) but curious how you might project a few years out?
Having said that, my use of 100x better here applies to 100x more effective at navigating use cases not in training set, for example, as opposed to doing things that are 100x more awesome or doing them 100x more efficiently (though seemingly costs, context window and token per unit of electricity seem to continue to improve quickly)
Just to give a few comparisons, the following things are two orders of magnitude apart:
1. The force felt by a mosquito landing on your arm and getting punched by Mike Tyson in his prime
2. A firecracker exploding and a stick of dynamite exploding
3. The heat from a candle and the heat from a blowtorch
4. The sound from a whisper and the sound from jet engine
So many examples come to mind… RealVideo -> YouTube, Myspace -> Facebook, Laserdisc -> DVD, MP3 players -> iPod…
UiPath may end up being the burned pancake, but the underlying problem they’re trying to address is immensely lucrative and possibly solvable (hey if we got the Turing test solved so quickly, I’m willing to believe anything is possible).
I’ve implemented quite a few RPA apps and the struggle is the request/response turn around time for realtime transactions. For batch data extract or input, RPA is great since there’s no expectation of process duration. However, when a client requests data in realtime that can only be retrieved from an app using RPA, the response time is abysmal. Just picture it - Start the app, log into the app if it requires authentication (hope that the authentication's MFA is email based rather than token based, and then access the mailbox using an in-place configuration with MS Graph/Google Workspace/etc), navigate to the app’s view that has the data or worse, bring up a search interface since the exact data isn’t known and try and find the requested data. So brittle...
CTO of healthcare org here.
I just put a hold on a new RPA project to keep an eye on this and see how it develops.
According to their docs, Anthropic will sign a BAA.
Sometimes, the AI is more accurate or safer than humans, but it still reads better to say "we always have humans in the loop". In those cases, we reap the benefits of both: Use the AI for safety, but still have a human fallback.
We haven't deployed a model like this, it's new.
I've done a ton of various RPAs over the years, using all the normal techniques, and they're always brittle and sensitive to minor updates.
For this, I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. I want to see and test how well it performs in the real world before I deploy it, and wait for it to come out of beta so Anthropic will sign a BAA.
The demo is impressive enough that I want to give the tech a chance to mature before my team and I invest a ton of time into a more traditional RPA.
At a minimum, if we do end up using it, we'll have solid guard rails in place - it'll run on an isolated VM, all of its user access will be restricted to "read only" for external systems, and any content that comes from it will go through review by our nurses.
I don't think this is going to work in that industry until local models get good enough to do it, and small enoguh to be affordable to hospitals.
Similarly I expect that once processing/searching laws/legal records becomes easy through LLMs, we'll compensate by having orders of magnitude more laws, perhaps themselves generated in part by LLMs.
So the solution to that is to add another layer of complex AI tech on top of it?
In my case I have a bunch of nurses that waste a huge amount of time dealing with clerical work and tech hoops, rather than operating at the top of their license.
Traditional RPAs are tough when you're dealing with VPNs, 2fa, remote desktop (in multiple ways), a variety of EHRs and scraping clinical documentation from poorly structured clinical notes or PDFs.
This technology looks like it could be a game changer for our organization.
So maybe like an automated ubikey that you can opt in to a nearby computer to have all the access. Especially if working from home, you can set it at a state where if you are in 15m radius of your laptop it is able to sign all access.
Because right now, considering amount of tools and everything I use and with single sign on, VPN, Okta, etc, and how slow they seem to be, it's extremely frustrating process constantly logging in to everywhere, and it's almost like it makes me procrastinate my work, because I can't be bothered. Everything about those weird little things is absolutely terrible experience, including things like cookie banners as well.
And it is ridiculous, because I'm working from home, but frustratingly high amount of time is spent on this bs.
A bluetooth wearable or similar to prove that I'm nearby essentially, to me that seems like it could alleviate a lot of safety concerns, while providing amazing dev/ux.
The main attack vector would then probably be some man-in-the-middle intercepting the signal from your wearable, which leads me to wonder whether you could protect yourself by having the responses valid for only an extremely short duration, e.g. ~1ms, such that there's no way for an attacker to do anything with the token unless they gain control over compute inside your house.
I'd bet that until we get the risks whittled down enough for larger organizations to adopt this on a wide scale, the biggest user group for AI automation tools will be at the level of individual workers who are eager to streamline their own tasks and aren't paid enough to care about those same risks.