  Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a fast-emerging automation technology
that sits between the fields of Business Process Management (BPM) and
Artificial Intelligence (AI), and allows organizations to automate high volume
routines. RPA tools are able to capture the execution of such routines
previously performed by a human users on the interface of a computer system,
and then emulate their enactment in place of the user by means of a software
robot. Nowadays, in the BPM domain, only simple, predictable business processes
involving routine work can be automated by RPA tools in situations where there
is no room for interpretation, while more sophisticated work is still left to
human experts. In this paper, starting from an in-depth experimentation of the
RPA tools available on the market, we provide a classification framework to
categorize them on the basis of some key dimensions. Then, based on this
analysis, we derive four research challenges and discuss prospective approaches
necessary to inject intelligence into current RPA technology, in order to
achieve more widespread adoption of RPA in the BPM domain.
