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The State of Process Automation- Goodbye, Scripted Bots — Hello, AI Co‑Workers
From RPA to Reasoning Agents: Strategic Imperatives for Board‑Level Automation Decisions
tl;dr — I have traced a clear arc from deterministic RPA to adaptive, LLM‑powered agents that now plan and execute work in real time. Commercial RPA still dominates stable, rules‑based tasks, but cost and fragility limit its range. Hyperscaler platforms add elastic scale yet lack deep UI dexterity. The real pivot is agentic AI — Claude’s Computer Use, OpenAI’s Operator, Simular S2 — that watches the screen, reasons, and clicks for itself. Early benchmarks show 25–40 % task‑completion rates on 50‑step workflows, hinting at parity with junior analysts within two years.
The playbook is hybrid: keep RPA for transaction volume, graft AI agents onto high‑variance steps, and govern them under the same controls you apply to human contractors.
Executive Summary
The first time I watched an LLM‑driven agent navigate a live ERP session — interpreting a dropdown it had never seen, correcting its own typo, and submitting a sales order without a single selector — I realized the conversation about “bots” was out of date. Our competitors are no…
