Functionalities For Business Developers Drive Democratization Leading general-purpose automation platform and portfolio vendors provide a raft of capabilities: process discovery tools; user interaction insights; business-user-friendly UIs; document and content analytics; sophisticated governance; and a plethora of automation technologies, such as AI agents, robotic and digital process automation (RPA and DPA), and API management.

DPA solutions excel at predetermined rules and procedures, making them ideal for repetitive operations like data entry, file management, or transaction processing. Forrester calls this intelligent automation (IA). Enterprises are now looking beyond IA: In Forrester’s Automation Survey, 2025, 54% of automation decision-makers said their organization needs to focus more on end-to-end automations, not just DPA workflows and robotic process automation (RPA) task automations.

CP4BA provides a unified platform for a wide range of automation needs: Business Automation Workflow (BAW), decision intelligence, intelligent delivery platform (IDP), content services, robotic process automation (RPA), and IBM Process Mining are primary components. Cloud infrastructure services are based on Red Hat OpenShift, while decision intelligence is based on Automation Decision Services.

For example, robotic process automation, low-code, application generation, integration platform as a service, and adaptive process orchestration platforms lead to terminology confusion and difficulty in vendor differentiation. Many buyers struggle to choose the right platform and avoid costly vendor lock-in that forces them to bend use cases to fit tools.

Vendors speak about a shift to composable architectures to build independent automation assets like workflows, robotic process automation (RPA), AI agents, and intelligent document processing (IDP). Vendors envision a platform that allows diverse automations to be composed without regard to specific design UIs.

Has added RPA, process intelligence, and document automation. Originally, the main DPA endpoints were humans and APIs. DPA built and managed a work pattern that coordinated human tasks using APIs to required systems. Most DPA platforms now have robotic process automation (RPA), which adds bots to these endpoints. In addition, process intelligence has boosted the process application metadata that DPA traditionally relied on.

Categories that expand automation stakeholders are also doing well, including digital process automation (DPA), robotic process automation (RPA), and API task automation, which growing numbers of automation enthusiasts are using in business roles. Generative AI (genAI) copilots are now in the hands of business developers, with application generation (AppGen) platforms lurking around the corner.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is no longer available as an isolated tool but an integral part of many automation platforms. As such, Forrester is refocusing its RPA-related research to deep RPA functionalities as they’re offered by these platform vendors. At the same time, we continue to evaluate all automation vendors from a platform point of view, of which most have either a history in RPA, digital process automation (DPA), or low-code software development.

In our 24-criterion evaluation of robotic process automation (RPA) service providers, we identified the most significant ones and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps technology leaders select the right one for their needs.

Vendors and enterprises are embedding reasoning and adaptive behavior into automation, testing how far they can push agentic capabilities without eroding foundational elements like trust or governance. This is causing markets like robotic process automation (RPA), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), low-code, and process intelligence to collide as boundaries blur.