Workflow-first, RPA only where the screen is the only door

A 14 August 2026 piece draws the line between mimicking a person inside an application (RPA) and orchestrating across systems by API, event and business logic. Its argument is operational rather than ideological: UI automation breaks on layout change, needs broad user-level permissions, is diagnosed by watching a screen and scales by adding bots — where API workflows keep state, carry execution history and audit trails, take granular scopes and scale by orchestration. Named anti-patterns: automating a broken process, screen-driving where an API exists, high-volume flows on fragile screen interactions, credentials in scripts.

What it means It is a vendor arguing its own architecture, and the failure modes it lists are still the ones that take an automation down six months in — read it as a checklist, not a verdict.