Gartner defines business orchestration and automation technologies (BOAT) as a consolidated software platform that delivers enterprise process automation by enabling capabilities including orchestration of business processes, enterprise connectivity, low code development and agentic automation. A BOAT platform includes a cross section of certain capabilities from different markets such as business process automation (BPA), low-code application platforms (LCAP), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), intelligent document processing (IDP), robotic process automation (RPA), collaborative workflow management and document management. However, this list is not necessarily all-encompassing.
Gartner defines the generative AI (GenAI) knowledge management apps/general productivity submarket as technologies that enable companies to better retrieve and contextualize information and insight from their knowledge bases, including enterprise AI search, conversational AI platforms, and productivity tools for communications and content development.
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 robotic process automation (RPA) as software that automates tasks within business and IT processes using software scripts that emulate human interaction with the application UI. RPA enables a manual task to be recorded or programmed into a software script, which users can develop through programming or by using the RPA platform’s low-code and no-code GUIs. This script can then be deployed and executed into different runtimes. The runtime executable of the deployed script is referred to as a bot or robot.
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.