While RPA can facilitate integration between applications and data sets it remains limited to using methods that actual users would employ through key strokes and mouse clicks. Enabling RPA to leverage the APIs of other systems would dramatically broaden the opportunities for further (hyper-) automation.

By Dwight Davis  – As we’ve discussed in earlier posts, robotic process automation (RPA) has made significant strides in recent years. By rapidly progressing beyond its initial focus on automating simple user interface (UI) tasks, RPA today has “come of age” to become a multifaceted and highly scalable automation platform.

But what about Gartner’s talk of moving beyond RPA to achieve “hyperautomation?” In practice, it turns out, RPA itself is rapidly becoming the universal automation platform that organizations require. It is doing this by encompassing and integrating the two main categories of automation: UI automation and application programming interface (API) automation.

It makes sense to have a common platform that spans both UI and API automation given that thousands of workplace processes have elements of each. And RPA, coming from the UI side of the automation spectrum, has a critical characteristic that positions it as the best platform for delivering “universal” automation: RPA emulates how people perform tasks.

Emulating human activities is more challenging – and ultimately more powerful – than simply automating computer-to-computer processes by connecting different systems via the APIs they expose. Put another way, it’s relatively simple to expand a UI-focused RPA platform by adding API capabilities to it, but not so simple to move in the other direction. Read On: