Attended automation is automation that runs alongside a person and depends on them to start it or step in at certain points. It usually lives on an employee’s own computer and acts like a helper that takes over the repetitive parts of a task while the human stays in charge.
Picture a sat-nav in a car. It does the route-planning and the turn-by-turn directions, but you are still driving and you can override it whenever you judge it necessary. Attended automation works the same way: during a customer call, a bot might pull up the account, fill the forms and copy data between screens, while the agent handles the conversation and the decisions. This sits at the human end of robotic process automation.
Its opposite, unattended automation, runs with no one present. Attended is the safer starting point for work that still needs human judgement, or where you want a person to confirm the result before it counts.
There is a catch worth naming. Because attended bots drive the same screens a human does, they break when a window moves, a button shifts, or a layout changes after an update, and a person has to notice and resume. They also tie up the worker’s machine while they run, so the employee waits during the slow parts. That makes attended automation a fit for high-touch, lower-volume work where a human is there anyway, not a thousand silent runs a night. For purely repetitive steps with no judgement involved, plain task automation is often the cleaner fit, since it can run on a server without anyone babysitting it.
At TopDevs we use attended automation to give a client’s team a fast, reliable assistant for high-touch work, then move tasks to fully unattended once they have proven themselves.
