You have a clear, step-by-step SOP for onboarding new suppliers. It runs through five clicks, three screens, and a file upload. A human follows it every day without issue. But when you hand the same steps to an RPA bot, the process breaks after the next system update. You spend weeks rebuilding the flowchart and retraining the model. The process sits idle while your team waits for a fix. This mismatch between what you wrote and what the bot can do is a hidden cost of legacy automation.
Why RPA breaks here
RPA tools like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Power Automate rely on selectors, xpaths, and object IDs to locate elements on a screen. When an application updates its UI, those identifiers change. The bot halts. Gartner estimates that around 60 percent of RPA maintenance hours go into fixing or rebuilding bots after simple UI changes. In large enterprises, this creates a backlog of broken processes that never get finished because fixing one bot opens three more. You end up with documentation that describes a perfect process, but the automation can no longer follow it.
What changes with computer use agents
- survives UI changes
- no brittle selectors
- recovers from exceptions
- follows the SOP as written
- works on legacy and Citrix
A computer use agent sees the screen and acts like a human, so it can follow your SOP without needing brittle selectors or a separate flowchart bot.
How to move without the risk
You do not need to rip out your existing RPA overnight. Start by identifying one high-pain process where UI changes or exceptions are frequent and the SOP is well defined. Run that process with a Coasty agent while keeping your RPA in place. Compare the two: agent uptime, time to fix, and how many times a human had to intervene. Then expand to another process that shares the same characteristics, high volume of exceptions, changing interfaces, or complex state management. RPA still works well for stable, high-volume backend transactions. Use it there. Use computer use agents for the rest.
The durable path forward
When your automation and your SOP describe the same steps, you gain two things. First, you stop paying for a rebuild treadmill every time the system changes. Second, you can evolve your process documentation without breaking your bots. Computer use agents let you automate exactly what you wrote, from legacy apps to modern SaaS platforms. They recover from unexpected states instead of halting, and they work across environments where RPA struggles, including Citrix and virtualized desktops. You can build a stronger digital workforce that stays in sync with how your teams actually work.
Ready to see how agents can follow your SOPs without breaking on every update? Book a demo with the Coasty team at https://cal.com/coasty/15min .
Want to see this in action?
View Case Studies