Gartner defines AI application development platforms as those that offer the required technology and workflows to design, build, test and deploy AI-embedded applications. These platforms provide access to foundation models and the capability to ground and place guardrails around them. Software engineering teams utilize these platforms to build AI applications, such as assistants, agents and multimodal applications. Software engineering leaders face increasing pressure to incorporate AI into their products. AI application development platforms host the necessary tooling for enterprise developers to build AI assistants, agents and multimodal apps without extensive knowledge of machine learning. AI application development platforms focus on providing the features developers need to ground models with organizational knowledge. They also reduce risk by implementing responsible AI processes and guardrails within their AI-embedded applications. These platforms help scale the development of AI-embedded applications by offering governance, evaluation metrics and support throughout the application life cycle. Not every platform will offer access to first-party models or application-testing capabilities.
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.