Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to products and services that enable machines to perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence—such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and language understanding. This category includes markets that focus on helping organizations build, deploy, and scale intelligent systems, utilizing AI across multiple industries through technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and generative AI.
Gartner defines business process automation (BPA) tools as software that enables the design, execution and monitoring of business processes involving diverse sets of systems and humans. BPA tools provide an environment for developing, running and monitoring business processes that incorporate process models (and other business, decision and data models) enabling automation of business operations. BPA tools play a crucial role in streamlining business processes, thereby increasing efficiency, reducing human error and enabling better decision making across various functions and industries.
Gartner defines intelligent document processing (IDP) solutions as specialized data integration tools that enable automated extraction of data from multiple formats and various layouts of document content. IDP solutions ingest data for dependent applications and workflows and can be provided as a software product and/or as a service. Organizations receive and process documents in multiple formats to enable activities such as onboarding new suppliers, receiving applications for loans or insurance claims. This results in large volumes of documents, the content of which is designed for human comprehension rather than machine processing. Extracting data from content is essential for document processing and the automated activities this supports. IDP solutions fulfill this role, augmented by and potentially replacing people. Documents are received in physical form, typically paper, which must be scanned for digitization, or in digital form, such as emails and PDFs. The content of these documents has varying layouts, ranging from structured formats, such as tabular or outline (e.g., list or hierarchy of headings) or invoices or contracts, to unstructured formats (i.e., free-flowing, such as an email). Layouts that fall between structured and unstructured, or mixing the two, are often referred to as semistructured.
Gartner defines process intelligence platforms as solutions that combine development and runtime software tools to mine, analyze, model, design, and monitor processes. They offer capabilities such as process and task mining, process modeling and designing, advanced process analysis, alerting, SLA and threshold-based tracking, anomaly detection, and interactive decision support by providing data about current processes and their conditions. AI and process automation opportunity discovery: By analyzing task and process-level data, the platform can pinpoint bottlenecks, delays, governance issues, compliance gaps, and manual handoffs that are ideal candidates for task or process automation and AI augmentation. It can also identify redundant steps and resource constraints that contribute to process inefficiencies. This use case helps discover and design to-be workflows by providing prioritized opportunity lists with estimated ROI, enabling enterprises to accelerate automation initiatives and maximize operational efficiency. Furthermore, this use case extends to providing a business operations context to ground AI agents, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and compliance requirements. Process improvement and optimization: This use case is essential for enterprises seeking to improve and optimize their operations by discovering, designing, modeling, and analyzing business processes. This enables end users to collaboratively redesign workflows (such as customer journeys, service delivery, or internal operations), leverage simulation capabilities to test future-state scenarios, and evaluate the impact of proposed changes. It also needs a centralized repository for storing process models, best practices, and improvement initiatives, enabling easy access, version control, and knowledge sharing across teams. Finally, through predictive and prescriptive analytics, users can identify optimal process improvements, anticipate outcomes, and make data-driven decisions that align with strategic objectives. Governance, risk, and compliance: Monitoring of process executions against regulatory requirements and internal policies ensures visibility into compliance. Automated audits, conformance checks, and risk scoring highlight policy violations and control weaknesses, empowering stakeholders to mitigate risks, enforce governance standards, and maintain audit trails. Bridging strategy to execution for digital transformation: This use case bridges the gap between strategic planning and daily operations by enabling data-driven actions. For example, when leadership sets a target customer satisfaction score, process intelligence tracks metrics such as response times and handoff delays, alerting teams to corrective steps and enabling process redesign where needed. If market data indicates a surge in demand, the platform simulates impacts across manufacturing and logistics, recommends adjustments, and updates roadmaps accordingly. By linking objectives, such as cost-to-serve reductions or quality improvements to key performance indicators (KPIs) and actionable triggers, organizations can ensure that every decision directly supports customer outcomes. Operations intelligence: This use case leverages dashboards, SLA tracking, and anomaly detection to continuously monitor process performance. It alerts to surface imminent issues, such as delays or exceptions, while historical and predictive analytics guide rapid root-cause analysis.
Gartner defines task mining as a combination of techniques to infer useful information from low-level event data available in UI logs derived from the underlying operating system or through observing application UI interactions. This data comes from individual users or a cohort in the form of screen recordings, keystrokes, mouse clicks and data entries. Additional mining capabilities interpret the data by applying natural language processing (NLP), optical character recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to correlate data in different ways. Task mining helps an enterprise identify inefficiencies and automation opportunities, increase worker productivity, and enhance the employee experience.