What Are API Tasks in Automation Anywhere?

API Tasks are a cloud-native way to run automations entirely on Automation Anywhere’s cloud infrastructure, without using a local bot runner. This managed offering is also known as the Automation Cloud Service. In essence, an API Task is a serverless automation that leverages APIs to perform work. Unlike traditional Task Bots that execute on a Windows VM or desktop, API Tasks execute in the cloud on AA-managed “cloud devices” and no on-premises bot agent is needed. This means faster execution and no dependency on a running desktop session. In fact, API Tasks can achieve near real-time speeds with millisecond latency, making them ideal for responsive integrations and event-driven workflows.
API Tasks fit naturally into the Automation 360 ecosystem as a new type of automation. You design them in the familiar bot editor, using many of the same packages (actions) available to RPA bots. The key difference is API Tasks can only use cloud-friendly actions – for example calling REST or SOAP web services, interacting with SaaS apps like Salesforce or Workday, etc, but not actions that require local files or UI interactions. In other words, you wouldn’t use an API Task to move a mouse or scrape a desktop screen. Instead, you use them to call endpoints and exchange data.
 

Automation Cloud Service

With API Task, you are offloading automation logic to the cloud. API Tasks eliminate the overhead of maintaining VMs or keeping robot agents up-to-date. There’s no Windows update to worry about, no local software to patch as Automation Anywhere manages the cloud runtime for you. This not only reduces maintenance work, but also unlocks more capacity: your traditional bot runners are freed up from doing API calls and can focus on tasks that truly require a local presence. Each Control Room comes with some API Task capacity included (for example, 100 free API Task runs with two concurrent executions) to encourage you to try it out. In short, API Tasks offer a fast, scalable, and hassle-free way to run automations – perfect for integrating systems via their APIs.

Benefits of Automation Cloud Service

One of the most exciting outcomes of using API Tasks is how it unlocks new scaling and orchestration capabilities for your automation program. Let’s zoom out and consider the big picture:

• Automatic scaling: Traditionally, if you needed to run 10 bots in parallel to handle increased work, you’d need 10 machines or VMs. With Automation Cloud Service ( API Tasks), scaling is dynamic and frictionless. The Automation Anywhere platform can scale the underlying compute to run multiple API tasks concurrently (within your license limits) without you provisioning anything. When you need more, increase your API Task concurrency and the cloud will handle it. This means your automations can scale with demand. For example, during end-of-month processing, dozens of API Tasks can be fired to process workloads simultaneously to maintain your SLAs and then scale back down during quiet periods.
• Better orchestration & responsiveness: API Tasks integrate nicely with Automation Anywhere’s orchestration tools like the new Process Composer as well as the Agentic components like the AI Skills & AI Agents. In a single automated process, you might have a mix of API Tasks, human-in-the-loop steps and maybe a traditional bot for a legacy app that really requires UI/screen automation. This hybrid orchestration is powerful. You can now design end-to-end processes that treat cloud and on-prem systems uniformly. For instance, a customer support workflow could: take an incoming web request, trigger an API Task to pull customer data from an on-site SQL database, use an AI service (cloud) to analyze sentiment, then have a human agent approve an action and finally trigger another API Task to update an on-prem CRM. The transitions are seamless. And because API tasks operate in real-time, the whole process can be completed in a fraction of the time a traditional approach would take, that might batch tasks or wait on schedules.
• Cost Efficiency: By offloading work to API Tasks, organizations can save on operational expenses for maintaining on premise infrastructure. You pay for what you use in terms of API Task execution time in the cloud, which is more cost-effective than keeping a VM running 24/7 just in case it needs to perform an integration. The cloud handles the heavy lifting of maintenance and scaling, so your team can focus on building automations, not on patching Windows or monitoring bot runner machines.
• Improved Reliability: Fewer moving parts (no local OS or application to crash mid-bot) means higher reliability for critical integrations. If a bot that updates your on-prem financial system runs as an API Task, it won’t fail because someone rebooted a VM or because of a remote desktop glitch. As long as the cloud service is up and the network path is open, it will run. And in the rare case the AA cloud has an issue, Automation Anywhere manages it freeing you from the 2 A.M. “bot server is down” calls. This reliability is especially crucial when scaling up. A 100 parallel operations are hard to keep stable on a patchwork of desktops, but much easier on the managed Automation Cloud Service.

Share some of the use cases that you’ll want to implement with API Task in the comments. We can’t wait to read them!

Thank you for reading. Go Be Great! 
 
Vineet Pujari 
Product Manager 
Automation Anywhere