https://www.reddit.com/r/rpa/comments/1iftre3/rpa_vs_ai_agents_vs_agentic_process_automation/
created by Physical-Artist-6997 on 02/02/2025 at 09:35 UTC
9 upvotes, 8 top-level comments (showing 8)
Hi everyone. Over the last weeks I have been seeing so many posts on LinkedIn and reddit that talk about the posible finishing of RPA topic and its transition into AI agents. Many people think that LLM-based agents and its corresponding orchestration will be the future in the next years, while others think that RPA will not die and there will be an automation world where both topics coexist, even they will be integrated to build hybrid systems. These ones, as I have been reading, are recently called Agentic Process Automation (APA) and its kind of RPA system that is allowed to automate repetitive tasks based on rules, while it also has the capability of understanding some more complex tasks about the environment it is working on due to its LLM-based system.
To be honest, I am very confused about all this and I have no idea if PLA is really the future and how to adapt to it. My technology stack is more focused on AI agents (Langgraph, Autogen, CrewAI, etc etc) but many people say that the development of this kind of agents is more expensive, and that companies are going to opt for hybrid solutions that have the potential of RPA and the potential of AI agents. Could anyone give me their opinion about all this? How is it going to evolve? In my case, having knowledge of AI agents but not of RPA, what would you recommend? Thank you very much in advance to all of you.
Comment by ReachingForVega at 02/02/2025 at 10:27 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Not everything needs an LLM to perform rules based decisions. In fact it's expensive (energy, cost, infra) or wasteful to do so.
Most rpa platforms are rebranding as AI platforms with rpa backbones so I suspect we'll see a blending of the two into the future.
What I hope to see is i proper AI Agents writing automations in the future but given how bad they are at coding it will be a while yet.
Comment by CosmicCodeRunner at 02/02/2025 at 10:26 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
My two cents on this is that for most enterprises, the bottleneck will be tooling. How will you interact with all your applications and data, transparently and be assured the outcomes are precise. Hence why RPA will still be popular. It’s much faster to build out and maintain an automation with an RPA solution than with a non low code platform.
Orchestrating agents and tools is not trivial, but it’s also not technically difficult. LangGraph is the great example of that and most RPA vendors are building this in or have some means of doing it already.
My take is that people who understand process automation and where the technology can be applied will be in demand. Being able to understand where there will be gaps in deploying an Agent/Tool combination and how to manage the risks, add human-in-the-loop layers, implement LLM-as-a-judge approaches, utilize evaluation metrics like F-scores etc.
Just keep reading and get hands on with EVERYTHING. But also think deeply about where it can be deployed.
Comment by Westbrook_Y at 02/02/2025 at 10:01 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I've worked as Upath rpa dev, and now i build chatbots. I feel like they need to co-exist because the AI agents are able to interact with apps only using API. For things where you don't have API and you want the bot to actually interact with an app and perform repetitive steps, you still need RPA. You can trigger this RPA process using the chatbot but i feel like this works only for smaller processes. In my previous company we had hundreds of different bot with a very big volume, it's imposibile to orchestrate this using AI agents
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Comment by Episodic_Beats at 02/02/2025 at 15:24 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It seems that RPA is not going to die but will cover less use cases. In my opinion the trend right now will gear towards workflow automation tools (make.com, n8n, etc.) where you can connect and call whatever tools are best for the use case (RPA, AI Agent, API, etc) or even for certain steps in the process. This increases the scope of processes that a process automation team can cover and makes them able to adapt to the changing tech landscape.
At my role currently we only use RPA strictly for UI click automations where there are no APIs available. AI Agents are slowly starting to be used but at this point the hype outweighs the actually utility. However that will definitely flip in the next 3-6 months. AI capabilities have an exponential growth not linear.
Comment by Goldarr85 at 02/02/2025 at 18:00 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
RPA is not going anywhere.
I’ve worked at a company that was one of the largest banking institutions in its state. They deployed software from a company who had few APIs and no integrations with the systems they wanted. The banking dev team had an overflowing backlog so they couldn’t get to making something custom and the company said there would be a wait and potential cost to build those APIs. We used RPA to build a UI automation to get the job done.
I now work for a large energy company. Much of the software they bought is old, built custom, protected by IT Security/Internal Audit. It also takes ages to get approval because support is outsourced to an awful company (they took 2 months to fix a simple permissions issue and advised a report was retired by the vendor when it wasn’t)
A LOT of people just assume there will be APIs for everything, but it takes devs to make them to start with and that assumes you’re not dealing with the above hurdles. RPA will be a thing in larger slower moving companies, but smaller companies probably won’t have much use for it if they have a dev team and APIs are available.
Comment by morewhitenoise at 02/02/2025 at 20:27 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You have use cases that need automation and you have tools to automate.
Line up the most suitable tool for each use case based on your value prop: Speed, Accuracy, Cost, Scale etc etc.
Ignore the puns and spin, its all gimmicks.
With that being said, RPA is crap and there is no real place for it in the modern tech stack.
Comment by IllustratorIll6179 at 02/02/2025 at 22:11 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
In Europe we'll be using rule based systems, RPA among them, long after the rest of the world is controlled by ASI, thanks to EU AI Act.