What’s the difference between “attended” and “unattended” RPA bots?

Published on: July 20, 2022
Last updated: December 16, 2022 Read in fullscreen view

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Robotic Process Automation continues to receive a lot of attention. Enterprises are embracing RPA to automate front-office and back-office tasks across a variety of industries.

Whatever the industry, the applications of RPA are boundless. RPA is used to create a digital workforce to automate repetitive tasks, maximizing knowledge workers’ productivity by enabling them to focus on higher-value activities. RPA is used to create software bots that mimic humans, interacting with multiple software applications to execute tasks at the user interface level. It is able to do this without changing the existing applications.

Attended versus unattended RPA bots

RPA bots can work in both “attended” and “unattended” modes. Typically targeted toward front-office activities, attended bots are useful when the entire end-to-end process can’t be automated. RPA bots can work alongside humans to deliver attended automation. In such cases, the actions of RPA bots can still be triggered by system-level events that can give and take data to and from human workers.

Unattended RPA bots execute tasks and interact with applications independent of human involvement. Unattended bots can be triggered by events and they can be scheduled.

A call center agent can get help from an attended RPA bot in near real time during a live customer call. For example, the attended bot can find customer data from one application and automatically type it into a second application. This way, the call center agent spends less time switching between applications and can focus on high-value tasks such as solving the customer’s problem.

Unattended bots typically perform batch operations that do not require user intervention. For example, a batch of new client information is received in a spreadsheet and needs to be entered into multiple applications.

What type of RPA is right for my business?

If you’re wondering which type of RPA is right for your business, we’ve got great news—you don’t need to choose. Both attended and unattended bots play an important role in an RPA deployment.

Working together

Attended and unattended RPA bots are not mutually exclusive. They both play an important role in an RPA deployment.

Attended bots optimize tasks by offloading portions of them, helping work get done faster. Unattended bots execute tasks and interact with applications independent of human involvement. The combination of attended and unattended RPA provides for a complete RPA solution.

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