If you have mundane (or not so), repetitive tasks in your organization with steps that are definitive and rules-based? Then you just might be a candidate for RPA.

By Stephanie Overby  – This year, the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market is predicted to hit $2.5 billion, having grown at a compound annual growth rate of between 70 and 80 percent over two years, according to a report produced by the Everest Group. There could be some 2.5 million robotic desktop automation (RDA) bots running on desktops and between 700,000 and 800,000 RPA robots on cloud and on-premise servers, Everest’s data says.

[ What’s the difference between RPA and AI? Read: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs. AI, explained. ]

Although RPA usage is expanding across industries, geographies, and organizational sizes, many RPA buyers are still in the earliest stages of research or adoption. For those just starting with RPA, there are a number of key concepts that are helpful to understand. Let’s delve into eight:

As we explained in our RPA in plain English primer, “RPA automates everyday processes that once required human action – often a great deal of it performed in rote, time-consuming fashion.” The software, often referred to as a bot, replicates how the human would interact with an application or system and then automates that task.

“An RPA bot typically performs the automated tasks the same way a human would – i.e., logging into systems with an ID, entering data, gathering output or results, performing rule-based tasks, and so on,” explains Siddhartha Sharad, director at consultancy Pace Harmon. Read On: