AI Agents vs RPA: How the Security Model Changes When the Bot Reasons Before It Acts
RPA bots execute deterministic scripts under a service account. AI agents read context, plan multi-step actions, and call tools whose return values shape the next step. The security model that worked for RPA (network segmentation, credential vaulting, scheduled execution) breaks when the bot reasons before it acts. This piece walks through the four architectural differences between RPA and AI agents, the new attack surfaces the reasoning step introduces, the identity-aware enforcement the deployment owes, and the audit record format that survives a regulator review.