An RPA bot is a single software worker inside a robotic process automation setup, built to run one specific process by acting like a person at a keyboard. It opens the apps, reads the screens, types the data and clicks the buttons that one job requires, following its instructions every time without deviation. It is the practical unit of work behind robotic process automation.
Think of a vending machine that does exactly one job: press the right combination and it delivers the same result every time, reliably and without thinking about it. An RPA bot is similar but for office work. Tell it to pull invoices from a shared inbox and enter them into accounting, and that is precisely what it does, run after run. Bots come in two flavours: an attended one helps a person at their desk, while an unattended one runs by itself in the background, often overnight.
Licensing is where the two split in practice. An unattended bot usually needs its own machine or virtual desktop to work on, since it cannot share a screen with a person, while an attended bot lives on a real employee’s computer and waits for them to trigger it. That difference drives much of the cost, so counting bots is really about counting the processes and the hours they need to run.
When you have many bots, you need something to schedule them, queue their work and report failures. That coordinator keeps a fleet of bots running smoothly instead of clashing over the same systems.
At TopDevs we configure each RPA bot for one clear process and monitor it, so the automation keeps running quietly long after we have handed it over.
