The automation industry has moved on quickly.  The “early” days of automation centred on automating simple repetitive tasks that humans got stuck with – only very consistent, rules driven processes could be automated.  This is referred to as Robotic Process Automation (RPA).  Advances in technology now allows us to read a wide variety of documents (OCR), to consistently and accurately replicate human decision making (ML), to be able to effectively engage with people in natural language (NLP & Chatbots) and to enhance the human interactions in a process through workflow and improved controls.  When you combine those capabilities with RPA you get what is commonly referred to as Intelligent Automation.