Within digital transformation, which is continuously progressing, robotic process automation (RPA) is drawing much corporate attention. While RPA is a popular topic in the corporate world, the academic research lacks a theoretical and synoptic analysis of RPA. Conducting a literature review and tool analysis, we proposein a holistic and structured wayfour traits that characterize RPA, providing orientation as well as a focus for further research. Software robots automate processes originally performed by human work. Thus, software robots follow a choreography of technological modules and control flow operators while operating within IT ecosystems and using established applications. Ease-of-use and adaptability allow companies to conceive and implement software robots through (agile) projects. Organizational and IT strategy, governance structures, and management systems therefore must address both the direct effects of software robots automating processes and their indirect impacts on firms.

An appropriate problem-solution-fit is essential to develop purposeful artificial intelligence (AI) applications. However, in domains with an unintuitive problem-solution-fit, such as project management (PM), organizations require methodological guidance. Hence, we propose a five-step method to develop organization-specific AI use cases: First, companies must consider the context factors technology, organization (in particular data and application domain), and environment. Second, companies must identify existing domain problems and AI solutions. Third, our method facilitates abstraction to understand the underlying nature of the identified problems and AI solutions. Fourth, our problem-solutionmatrix assists companies to match AI functions with the domain context. Fifth, companies derive necessary implications for the subsequent use case implementation. To construct and evaluate our method, we followed the design science research paradigm complemented by situational method engineering and based on 14 interviews. Our method addresses a relevant practical problem and contributes to identifying purposeful AI use cases in unintuitive application domains.

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