Agentic process automation is a kind of robotic process automation (RPA) in which a person tells the software robot what to do in plain English, and an AI model carries it out. No developer programs each click. It is also called natural-language automation.
In ordinary RPA, a developer records every step: open this screen, click this field, copy this value. The bot does exactly that. In agentic process automation, the instruction is written as a person would write it to a new colleague. A large language model (LLM), the kind of AI model that reads and writes text, turns the instruction into actions in the company's systems. When a case does not fit the instruction, the software stops and asks a person, instead of guessing.
Say an electronics distributor in Kolkata wants to chase late payments from its dealers. Its finance manager writes: "Every morning, list the invoices in the ERP that are more than 30 days past their due date. Email each of those dealers a polite reminder with the invoice number and the amount. If a dealer has already paid but the payment is not yet matched to the invoice, do not send a reminder. Tell me instead." On Tuesday, the software finds 42 unpaid invoices. Nine of them are more than 30 days overdue, worth ₹6.8 lakh in total. Before writing, it checks the bank statement. One dealer has paid ₹74,000, but the payment has not been matched to the invoice. So the software sends eight reminders, and asks the manager about the ninth. The manager reads the note and confirms that the dealer has paid.
The next week, the manager wants to wait longer before sending reminders. She changes "30 days" to "45 days" in her instruction. No developer is needed.
This approach has risks of its own. A language model can misread an instruction, or state something untrue with confidence. This is called AI hallucination. So the software records every action it takes, and sends the cases it is unsure of to a person. This is the idea of human in the loop. Software that takes on a whole role, rather than one instruction, is covered under AI agents for enterprise work. The wider idea is explained on the page on agentic automation.