Orchestrator - Robots (2024)

Attended robots act as the personal assistant of end-users such as HR personnel, Call Center operators, etc. Because attended automation must run under human supervision, it is best suited for smaller, more fragmented tasks. For example, the submission of an expense report is a task that lends itself to attended automation, where the user provides the credentials to log in to the system and the automation then fills in the requisite information, attaches any needed items, and submits the report on the user's behalf.

As there is always a human user present, attended automations must not be created with or granted permissions to perform tasks the user themselves could not. Any credentials required during the execution of an attended process should always be credentials that the user triggering the automation knows and provides themselves.

This is because there is no way to ensure security isolation between running automation and the machine user. If the automation itself performs actions the user does not have access to, it would thereby allow that user access that they are not otherwise granted. Taking the expense report example from above, if bundled in that automation is also the process of approving expense reports, the user could simply pause or stop the automation after it has logged in to the approval system and then approve any report in any amount, an action they could not perform with their own credentials.

Because attended robots impersonate real individuals, they should run under user accounts.