Towards intelligent robotic process automation for BPMers

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a fast-emerging automation technology that sits between the fields of Business Process Management (BPM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and allows organizations to automate high volume routines. RPA tools are able to capture the execution of such routines previously performed by a human users on the interface of a computer system, and then emulate their enactment in place of the user by means of a software robot. Nowadays, in the BPM domain, only simple, predictable business processes involving routine work can be automated by RPA tools in situations where there is no room for interpretation, while more sophisticated work is still left to human experts. In this paper, starting from an in-depth experimentation of the RPA tools available on the market, we provide a classification framework to categorize them on the basis of some key dimensions. Then, based on this analysis, we derive four research challenges and discuss prospective approaches necessary to inject intelligence into current RPA technology, in order to achieve more widespread adoption of RPA in the BPM domain.