Agentic automation vs RPA vs IPA: which fits which work?

RPA follows rules, IPA adds models to fill in the gaps, and agentic automation lets an AI agent choose the steps. Three worked examples show where each one belongs.

AI & Agents

VeloPhex Product

RPA platform buyer's guide 2026: criteria, scoring and vendors

A vendor-neutral framework for choosing an RPA platform: eight criteria, the questions that expose real differences, a weighted scoring table and a named-vendor comparison you can take into your next evaluation.

Enterprise Automation

What is agentic automation? A practical guide for enterprises

Agentic automation pairs AI agents that reason with robots that act, under governance that decides what either may do. Here is what it is, how it differs from RPA, IPA and chatbots, and how to start safely.

Bot identity: non-human identity for RPA and AI agents

Robots and AI agents are non-human identities that authenticate thousands of times a day. Give them key pairs, short-lived tokens, narrow grants and outbound-only connections, not a password that lives forever.

Architecture

VeloPhex Security

Scaling RPA bots: what actually breaks as the fleet grows

Going from fifty robots to a thousand rarely fails where people expect. It fails in job claiming, presence, retries and reconnect storms, and AI agents add new limits of their own. Here is what to design for.

VeloPhex Engineering

RPA credential management: leases instead of stored passwords

Robots and AI agents need real secrets to reach real systems. Good RPA credential management decides how briefly each secret exists on the machine, who used it, and what happens when the vault is down.

Engineering

Automation center of excellence without the bottleneck

A CoE should make good automation easy, not make all automation wait in line. How to split ownership between the center and business units, govern AI agents alongside bots, and tell whether it is working.

RPA vs AI agents: matching the pattern to the process

RPA and AI agents are not rivals. Robots execute known rules, agents interpret messy inputs, and people decide what matters. Here is how to tell which step needs which, with a decision table.

Which process to automate first: a scoring method that works

The first automation sets the tone for the whole program. Score candidates on six questions, then decide whether the winner needs RPA, an AI agent or both.