Robotic process automation, the two-decade-old category of software that scripts bots to click through screens and move data between systems, is in the middle of an existential rebrand. This week's flurry of vendor moves shows just how fast the ground is shifting beneath the traditional RPA business model.
Automation Anywhere adds a reasoning engine
The most concrete news came from Automation Anywhere, which expanded its Agentic Process Automation (APA) system with a new reasoning layer. As one industry analyst put it, "Agentic AI is both a threat and an opportunity for RPA vendors" because it lets incumbents evolve into orchestration platforms for AI agents, leveraging their existing enterprise trust and tooling. But the same analyst warned the threat is real too, since the agentic AI ecosystem is expanding quickly, with big tech vendors including Google, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and others providing their own agentic orchestration products. Automation Anywhere's move follows a similar April push from UiPath, underscoring how closely the two rivals are shadowing each other's roadmaps as they try to stay relevant against a wave of AI-native challengers.
UiPath leans into its 'second act'
UiPath, the largest pure-play RPA vendor, continues to reposition its entire stack around what it now calls agentic business orchestration. The company's platform has evolved well past screen-scraping bots: it now enables AI agents, robots, people, and models to work together in coordinated workflows, including Maestro process orchestration, agent builder, RPA and API automation, intelligent extraction, and centralized governance. That strategy appears to be resonating financially — UiPath posted a strong Q2 beat, and market watchers noted a notable jump in large customers, with upward revisions in EPS estimates and a strong 21% rise in million-dollar customers, indicating deeper enterprise adoption of its automation solutions. The company has also been expanding geographically to meet localized compliance demands, most recently pushing agentic AI capabilities into on-premises and government deployments to satisfy strict data-sovereignty rules.
Blue Prism bets on WorkHQ
SS&C Blue Prism, the third major legacy RPA brand, has taken its own swing with WorkHQ, an agentic automation platform announced this year. Per its own description, the company announced WorkHQ, marketed as SS&C Blue Prism WorkHQ, an agentic automation platform for coordinating AI agents, software robots and people within one system.
The bigger picture
Taken together, these moves confirm a trend that analysts have been flagging all year: RPA isn't disappearing, but it's being absorbed into something bigger. Rules-based bots increasingly serve as the reliable, auditable execution layer beneath more adaptive, reasoning-capable AI agents — a hybrid architecture rather than a wholesale replacement. For enterprises that spent the last decade building RPA estates, the question is no longer whether to add AI agents, but how fast the big three (and a growing pack of AI-native startups) will let them do it without ripping out what already works.
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