Robotic process automation and intelligent automation both refer to the process of automating business workflows with software. However, RPA is a traditional technology where users recorded the tasks and the software copied the recording. For instance, the user could record a task. They could open a folder, open a file, copy the data into another system, then close the file. Then, RPA could repeat the same process at scale.
Building on that, IA is the future of RPA. It uses advanced technologies so RPA can automate increasingly complex tasks with minimum human intervention. Moreover, IA can learn and improve over time. For example, IA can extract relevant data from scanned invoices. Over time, it learns the frequent invoice templates your organization uses and gets faster and more accurate at data extraction.