What is hyperautomation? (And is the term still current?)
Hyperautomation describes an organization-wide push to automate everything automatable, coordinating RPA, AI, process mining and integration tools rather than buying one. Gartner made it the number one strategic technology trend for 2020 and repeated it in 2021 and 2022. It has not appeared on that list since.
What is hyperautomation?
Gartner coined hyperautomation in October 2019 and made it the number one strategic technology trend for 2020. The definition: a business-driven, disciplined approach where an organization identifies, vets and automates as many business and IT processes as it can, through an orchestrated mix of RPA, AI, machine learning, process mining, iPaaS and packaged software. The scope is the whole company. Buying one RPA tool does not qualify.
Check the date on the word
Hyperautomation held a slot on Gartner's top trends list for 2020, 2021 and 2022, then dropped off. It has not returned for 2023 through 2026, where the automation slot now goes to multiagent systems. Gartner still publishes hyperautomation market research, so the category was not deleted, but the marketing peak passed around 2022. The numbers from that peak were large: $596.6 billion of hyperautomation-enabling software spend forecast for 2022, up from $481.6 billion in 2020, plus a call that organizations pairing those tools with redesigned processes would cut operating costs 30% by 2024.
Does the label deserve budget?
The discipline does. The word does not. Everything useful under the banner (finding which processes are worth automating, sequencing them, measuring what came back) survives without the term, and a vendor leading a 2026 deck with it is selling 2021 vintage. Teams already running Zapier or n8n face the same question in cheaper form: which existing flows justify a rebuild as agents. Use hyperautomation as a checklist for scope, then fund named processes with named owners, never the program itself.
Last updated: Sep 5, 2026