RPA (Robotic Process Automation)
RPA is software that mimics a person's clicks and keystrokes to operate an existing application's user interface, used when a system has no usable API to integrate with directly.
RPA tools record or script a sequence of UI interactions — click this button, read this field, type into that box — and replay them against the same application a human would use. It's the automation approach of last resort in a useful sense: reached for specifically when a system doesn't expose an API, and the only reliable way in is the interface itself.
The tradeoff is fragility. Because RPA depends on the exact layout of a UI, a vendor updating their software's interface can silently break the automation — a button moves, a field gets renamed, and the bot either fails loudly or, worse, clicks the wrong thing. API-based integration is preferred wherever it exists, precisely because it doesn't share this failure mode.
Where RPA earns its place is legacy systems and vendor software with genuinely no integration path — old desktop applications, some government portals, internal tools nobody maintains anymore. We reach for it as a targeted fallback within a broader workflow automation build, not as the default integration method.