RPA tools have emerged and are used as part of an enterprise-grade automation platform to connect processes with comprehensive controls and security. With advancing automation requirements, RPA vendors have added additional technologies to enable the automation of tasks that could not be automated with simple RPA.

With the addition of these new technologies, all the top RPA tools now offer a platform for automation. Each platform offers an "operating system" that can be used to build and manage Bots. You can then add additional components such as AI-ML, which you need for your automation, using components provided by the vendors themselves, their partners, or community members. So, RPA is becoming a gateway technology to using new or advancing technologies and paradigms for automation.

Most RPA software vendors are adding to the core RPA function in a few common areas. These areas include the following:

• Artificial intelligence (AI-ML)
• Process mining and/or process discovery
• Intelligent document processing (OCR/ICR/ML)
• Conversational AI (Chatbots)
• Advanced analytics

Gartner has come up with the term hyperautomation to refer to this approach of using a basket of technologies, including RPA for automation.