AI Process Automation: AI Agents vs RPA + ROI Framework
Your RPA deployment is handling 200 invoices a day. Then a supplier starts sending PDFs in a new format and the bot breaks. You spend a week fixing it, only to discover three other edge cases have been failing silently for months. This is where traditional automation runs out of road. It is also why operations, finance, and delivery teams are rethinking what they mean by automation in 2026. AI process automation uses AI agents and machine learning to execute, monitor, and optimize business workflows that include unstructured inputs, repeated exceptions, and context-sensitive routing. The important distinction is not that AI sounds smarter. It is that the workflow can keep moving when inputs are messy, while still escalating risky cases for human review. ...