Business process automation is software that does the routine work people do between a company's systems: copying data from one screen to another, checking documents against records, and approving requests. It is also called BPA. The work it takes over is mostly desk work in back offices.
Consider an auto-parts distributor in Ludhiana. An employee in the accounts team receives 250 supplier invoices a week by email. For each one, she opens the PDF, types the supplier, the amount and the GST into the ERP, and forwards the invoice to a manager. The manager approves it by replying to the email. This is slow, and mistakes are easy to make.
The industry has come at this work in four ways.
The first is the robot at the keyboard. Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software robot that does what a person does on screen: it opens the email, reads the PDF and types the figures into the ERP. Newer robots are given their instructions in plain English, through agentic process automation.
The second is to see the process before changing it. Process mining reads the time stamps that every invoice leaves in the company's systems. From them, it shows how long each step really takes, and where invoices wait. Task mining watches the screens instead, to see the work at each desk.
The third is to build the process as an application. Business process management (BPM) and case management software turns a piece of work, such as an invoice approval or a loan application, into a case that moves through set steps, with rules and deadlines. Many such applications are built on a low-code platform.
The fourth, and newest, is the agent. AI agents for enterprise work are AI software given access to a company's systems and a goal. They read the email, work out what is being asked, and act in the systems. They are sold as a worker, not a tool, and are often priced per task done instead of per user. The page on SaaS pricing models explains the difference. For individuals and small businesses, AI productivity tools produce a report or a slide deck from one instruction.
India has a large share of this industry. Several workflow and task mining companies were started in India, or by Indian founders whose engineers work in India. The largest automation companies also run major engineering centres in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. The general idea of software doing a person's desk work is explained on the page on agentic automation.