Notes from this article by Andreesen Horowitz RIP to RPA: The Rise of Intelligent Automation

Traditionally, robotics process automation (RPA), was a hard coded “bot” that mimicked exact key strokes necessary to complete a task. With LLMs, however, the original vision of RPA is now possible. An AI agent can be prompted with an end goal, e.g. book a flight from DSM to ORD on these dates, and will have the correct agents available to complete the task.

There is a large opportunity for startups in this space, because no existing product meets the original vision of RPA. There are two main areas:

horizontal AI enablers that execute a specific function for a broad range of industries, and vertical automation solutions that build end-to-end workflows tailored to specific industries.