Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
RPA automates repetitive digital tasks with explicit, rule-based scripts — click here, copy this field, paste it there. It's deterministic and brittle: it does exactly what it's told and breaks when the screen or process changes, which is the contrast that defines AI agents.
Also known as: RPA
RPA is the previous generation of “digital workers”: software that follows hard-coded rules to move data between systems and click through interfaces. It’s useful for stable, high-volume tasks, and it’s fully deterministic — it does precisely what it was scripted to do, every time.
Its weakness is also its definition: it has no judgment. Change the layout, hit an unexpected case, or vary the input and the script breaks. That’s the line people draw to explain AI agents — where RPA follows a fixed path, an agent reasons about the goal and adapts. The trade-off comes with it: agents handle variation RPA can’t, but they’re non-deterministic and need evaluation and guardrails that rule-based automation never required.