Attended Versus Unattended Remote Automation

Robotic process automation (RPA) procedures, also known as UI automation, are a series of programming instructions that drive an application through a series of UI actions—simulated keyboard and mouse entry—that mimic actions that a human user would have performed. The technique is mostly useful to control applications that do not offer an API to achieve similar results or whose API lacks certain required functions.

A bot is a computer program (usually a Power Automate flow) that performs actions in place of a human user. When accessing software like Office that is licensed per user, each bot needs a license just as a physical user would.

Bots can contain RPA procedures and can be run either manually (through a button click or other action) or automatically (invoked by some trigger or timer). The two scenarios correspond to different tiers of license requirements, so it is important to plan based on an organization’s budget.

For example, if a procedure should be run each time an HR group receives a new résumé submission, that procedure can be triggered with the following: