As if to prove this very point, last month RPA vendor UiPath listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market cap of more than $35 billion. This is pretty impressive for software that largely follows predefined rules, and is commonly seen as the less sophisticated cousin to the more mature artificial intelligence (AI), and it highlights the massive scope of these kinds of processes. 

So what does RPA deliver to the business world, and to the finance department specifically? How does it compare to AI, and where should you use one over the other? 

To answer these questions we need to look beyond how RPA and AI actually do things, to the difference they make to organizations.