RPA and AI agents — not a replacement
Written for organisations that already run RPA and are being asked to modernise.
AI Tools Hub Editorial · published · updated
Different properties
| RPA | AI agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Behaviour | Replays recorded steps | Decides from context |
| Exceptions | Only anticipated branches | Responds to the unanticipated |
| Reproducibility | High | Low |
| Cost | Licence, fixed | Metered per run |
Do not migrate
- Identical steps with almost no exceptions
- High volume where per-item cost matters
- Processes where exactness is mandatory, like payroll
- Anything already stable and cheap to maintain
The last is the important one. Migrate because of a named problem, not because the technology is newer.
Worth migrating
- Processes where the branch count keeps growing
- Unstructured input: free text, attachments
- Work you previously gave up automating
- Flows that break constantly on screen changes
An RPA flow with a hundred branches nobody fully understands is the clearest candidate: what the branches were trying to express is better expressed as judgement.
Cost inverts
Licences do not care how often you run; metered agents do. At a thousand items a day RPA is usually cheaper; at ten items requiring real judgement, the reverse.
Run them together
Let the model decide which process a document belongs to, and let RPA perform the settled data entry. That preserves the existing investment and fills the gap, with far less migration risk than wholesale replacement.
FAQ
Will our licence count drop?
Branch maintenance effort drops. Licence count tracks the number of processes, so it changes little.