Intelligent process automation

Intelligent process automation and Gartner: which quadrant is it in?

Matthew Diakonov, Written with AI

Published June 19, 20268 min read

People search this expecting to find one chart: the Gartner Magic Quadrant for intelligent process automation. It does not exist. IPA is an umbrella term, and Gartner spreads its pieces across four separate research documents. This page is the map, plus an honest note on the one place a legacy-systems buyer often ends up looking that none of the four currently rate.

Direct answer · verified 19 Jun 2026

No, there is no Gartner Magic Quadrant for intelligent process automation. Gartner covers IPA across four surfaces: the Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation, the Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT, published October 2025), the inaugural Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Document Processing (September 2025), and the Market Guide for Business Process Automation Tools.

Verified against Gartner's public market listings on 19 June 2026. Corroborating vendor coverage of the 2025 RPA quadrant is published by UiPath, and a neutral overview of the broader category is on Wikipedia.

Why “intelligent process automation” has no single quadrant

Gartner defines intelligent process automation as the use of technology such as AI and machine learning to automate and optimize business processes. That definition is broad on purpose: it covers reading a document, driving an application, and orchestrating a multi-step process. Those are three genuinely different engineering problems, and Gartner rates them in three different places. A Magic Quadrant only gets published when a category is mature and well-bounded enough to rank a stable field of vendors against the same axes. IPA, as a phrase, is too wide for that.

The market data underneath the umbrella is real, though. Per Gartner's 2025 RPA coverage, the RPA software market generated about 3.8 billion dollars in 2024, up 18 percent year over year, while the same write-up flags the rise of broader enterprise automation platforms and AI-based alternatives to deterministic RPA. That second clause is the whole reason a buyer searching for IPA ends up bouncing between two or three categories instead of landing in one.

One umbrella term, four Gartner surfaces

Intelligent
process
automation

RPA MQ

BOAT MQ

IDP MQ

BPA Market Guide

The four surfaces, and what each one actually rates

Read them in this order. The first answers “who runs my workflow,” the rest widen out toward platform strategy.

Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation

The established quadrant. The 2025 edition evaluates 13 RPA vendors and named both UiPath and Automation Anywhere Leaders. This is the deterministic, rules-following execution layer: click, type, read a field by a defined path. Read this if your question is 'who are the incumbent bot vendors,' but know that Gartner's own write-up flags that AI innovations have introduced alternatives to traditional deterministic RPA.

Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT)

Published October 2025, assessing roughly 20 vendors. This is Gartner's bet on where the market is converging: low-code app platforms, RPA, business process automation, and integration collapsing into one orchestration layer. Read this if your question is 'what does the consolidated automation platform of the next few years look like,' not 'what runs my SAP data entry tomorrow.'

Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

The inaugural edition landed September 2025. IDP is the perception half of intelligent automation: turning a scanned invoice, claim, or form into structured data. Read this if the hard part of your workflow is reading unstructured documents rather than driving an application.

Market Guide for Business Process Automation Tools

Gartner replaced the old BPM Magic Quadrant with a Market Guide for BPA tools. A Market Guide is a survey of a maturing or fragmented space, not a ranked quadrant. Read this for the process-orchestration and workflow layer that sits above the bots.

How to get from the research to a decision

The quadrants are a starting shortlist, not a verdict. Here is the path from “I read the analyst report” to “I bought the right thing.”

From quadrant to pilot

Name the bottleneck, not the category

Is the pain reading documents, driving a legacy application, or orchestrating a long process? Each maps to a different Gartner surface. 'Intelligent process automation' as a phrase spans all three, which is exactly why no single quadrant carries it.

Read the matching quadrant for the incumbents

If the bottleneck is application-driving on legacy desktop systems, the RPA quadrant is your shortlist of the deterministic vendors. Treat it as the field, not the verdict.

Check what the quadrant explicitly does not rate

Gartner notes AI-native alternatives to deterministic RPA in the same RPA write-up. Newer and open-source approaches that read the OS accessibility tree instead of pixels are not yet their own rated category. The thing you may be shopping for can sit in that gap.

Pilot on your worst real workflow

A quadrant position predicts analyst sentiment, not whether a tool survives your SAP GUI after a version bump. The only honest test is a two-week pilot on the workflow that breaks most often.

The gap the quadrants do not rate yet, made concrete

Gartner's RPA write-up names AI-based alternatives to deterministic RPA without yet ranking them as their own category. The most useful way to understand that gap is not a definition; it is a piece of code you can open. Mediar's answer to “what happens when the screen changes” is a four-strategy element-resolution cascade, and it is inspectable in the open-source codebase.

Anchor fact you can verify

The self-healing logic lives in apps/desktop/src-tauri/src/focus_state.rs, in the function restore_focus_state. When the agent goes to act on an element, it runs four strategies in order:

1Relocate the element by its accessibility or automation ID. When the app exposes a stable identifier, nothing downstream has to run.
2Match by window context and bounds: walk the owning process's window tree and match on shape and position inside that window, not absolute screen coordinates.
3Fall back to the element's visible text content. A button still labeled “Post” is still the button, even after a re-theme moved and recolored it.
4If the control genuinely cannot be found, restore focus to the correct window and log the miss, instead of blindly clicking a coordinate that now belongs to something else.

Because no single brittle selector is load-bearing, a moved field or a re-theme usually resolves through a later strategy rather than breaking the run. You can read the full file in the open-source SDK at github.com/mediar-ai/terminator. That is the difference a quadrant axis does not capture: not a feature checkbox, but how the tool behaves at the moment a legacy UI shifts under it.

Where Mediar fits, and where it does not

Mediar is not a rated vendor in any Gartner Magic Quadrant. It is a newer AI-native desktop automation product with an open-source SDK, and the quadrants rate established deterministic-RPA and platform incumbents. We would rather say that plainly than imply a placement we do not hold.

What Mediar is built for is the narrow, painful case the RPA quadrant incumbents struggle with: workflows on legacy Windows desktop systems that have no clean API, such as SAP GUI, Oracle EBS, mainframe terminals, Jack Henry, Fiserv, FIS, Epic, and Cerner. Instead of matching pixels or selectors, the agents read the OS accessibility tree and self-heal through the cascade above. Pricing is 0.75 dollars per minute of runtime with no per-seat licensing, plus a 10,000 dollar turn-key program fee that converts to usage credits, so there is no six-figure platform license to sign before you know it works.

One F&B chain that moved from UiPath to Mediar reported a 70 percent cost reduction to its board. The honest boundary: if your data lives entirely in modern web apps with clean APIs, a browser-based agent or one of the rated platforms is a fine choice. The accessibility-tree approach earns its place specifically on the no-API legacy desktop layer, which is exactly the layer those tools struggle with.

Skip the quadrant debate and pilot it on your worst workflow

Bring the legacy desktop workflow that breaks most often. We will show you whether the accessibility-tree approach survives it in a two-week pilot.

Intelligent process automation and Gartner: FAQ

Is there a Gartner Magic Quadrant for intelligent process automation?

No. Gartner does not publish a single document called the Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Process Automation. IPA is an umbrella term, and Gartner covers its pieces across separate research: the Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation (the execution bots), the Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies published October 2025 (the converging platform layer), the inaugural Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Document Processing published September 2025 (the document-reading layer), and the Market Guide for Business Process Automation Tools (the orchestration layer). If you went looking for one IPA quadrant and could not find it, that is why.

How does Gartner define intelligent process automation?

Gartner frames intelligent process automation as the use of technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to automate and optimize business processes, with the goal of improving efficiency, reducing cost, and improving decisions. In practice it means robotic process automation plus a reasoning or perception layer, so the system can handle inputs and decisions a fixed script cannot. Gartner ties the broader idea to hyperautomation, which it describes as a business-driven, disciplined approach to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.

Where does Mediar sit in the Gartner quadrants?

Mediar is not currently a rated vendor in any Gartner Magic Quadrant. It is a newer, AI-native desktop automation product with an open-source SDK, and the quadrants rate the established deterministic-RPA and platform incumbents. We would rather be honest about that than imply a placement we do not have. The useful framing: Gartner's own RPA write-up notes that AI innovations have introduced alternatives to traditional deterministic RPA, and Mediar is one of those alternatives. It reads the operating system accessibility tree the way screen readers do, instead of matching pixels or brittle selectors.

What is the difference between the RPA quadrant and the BOAT quadrant?

The Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation rates the bot-execution layer: tools that drive applications by following a defined path. The Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies, which Gartner published in October 2025 and which assesses around 20 vendors, rates the broader convergence of low-code platforms, RPA, business process automation, and integration into a single orchestration layer. RPA is a component; BOAT is the platform some vendors are trying to become. A buyer automating a specific legacy workflow tomorrow cares about the first; a buyer planning a multi-year platform consolidation cares about the second.

Should I only buy automation tools that appear in a Gartner quadrant?

A quadrant is a useful shortlist of established vendors and a signal of analyst sentiment, but it is a lagging indicator. New approaches, and most open-source tools, do not appear until a category matures enough for Gartner to formalize it. If your hardest workflow lives on a no-API legacy desktop system, the relevant question is not the quadrant position; it is whether a given tool can read that application reliably and keep running after a UI change. That is answered by a pilot, not a chart.

How big is the RPA market Gartner tracks?

Per Gartner's 2025 coverage, the RPA software market generated about 3.8 billion dollars in 2024, an 18 percent increase year over year. The same coverage notes the rise of enterprise automation platforms (the BOAT category) and AI-based alternatives to deterministic RPA, which is the structural shift behind why a buyer searching for 'intelligent process automation' increasingly lands between two or three Gartner categories rather than inside one.

What makes Mediar's approach different from the deterministic RPA in the quadrant?

Deterministic RPA tends to identify on-screen controls by coordinates, screenshot template matching, or auto-generated selectors, all of which break when a window moves, a theme changes, or a legacy app renumbers a field. Mediar reads the accessibility tree, so a field is identified by its role and name. When an element shifts, it resolves through a fallback cascade rather than snapping the run. That cascade is concrete and inspectable, not a slogan: it lives in the open-source codebase and is described in the section above.