Robotic process automation (RPA) is the term used for software tools that partially or fully automate human activities that are manual, rule-based, and repetitive. They work by replicating the actions of an actual human interacting with one or more software applications to perform tasks such as data entry, process standard transactions, or respond to simple customer service queries.Author summarizes the results of five years of effort in deploying hundreds of bots for dozens of organizations around the world. Along the way he experienced any number of failures, missteps, hyperbole and errors as people tried to learn how to use this new technology. This book lays out the eighteen different ways that bots seem to "fail" and how to avoid those failures with your own bots. The book also discusses the next wave of cognitive bots and artificial intelligence, and how these technologies are even more finicky and difficult to succeed with. Over the next ten years cyber workers like bots will subsume an enormous amount of the work currently performed by humans. Their adoption is inevitable.