A decade ago, RPA meant screen-scraping bots that clicked legacy desktop apps faster than a temp could. The category looks different now.
Attended and unattended bots still handle UI work inside an ERP, a CRM, or whatever billing tool the finance team won’t retire. API-first orchestration calls cloud services directly wherever an integration point exists.
The bigger change is document understanding. Hyperscalers call it intelligent document processing. It reads invoices, contracts, and government forms in two stages. Computer vision detects layout, tables, and field positions. A language model on top extracts the values and resolves the ambiguity. In practice, contract clauses and invoice fields land in the ERP without re-keying. [Read more…] about Robotic Process Automation in 2026: A Buyer’s Guide for Procurement Teams