What is Guerrilla Process Automation?
The automation your CoE never got to. That's what GPA is for.
You filed the ticket eighteen months ago.
You checked the portal in March. Still open. Checked again last month. Still open. You stopped checking. You do the work manually now — every Monday morning, same three portals, same Excel file, same two hours. It's faster than waiting.
The industry calls this a backlog. That's a polite word for it.
What Actually Happened With RPA
Enterprise automation worked. That part is true, and it deserves credit.
The big, structured, IT-visible processes got automated. Payroll transfers. Claims processing at volume. Invoice extraction from standard templates. The CoE delivered real ROI. The case studies are real.
Then something happened. The backlog stopped shrinking.
Automation requests pile up faster than the CoE can deliver. Every process that gets automated surfaces three more requests. Demand scales exponentially. Headcount scales linearly. By the time a request gets scoped, prioritised, resourced, and built — if it survives reprioritisation at all — the business has often moved on or built a manual workaround. The queue isn't a waiting room. It's where requests go to die quietly.
A significant chunk of CoE capacity isn't building new automation — it's maintaining what's already running. Bots break when UIs update. Every quarter, something needs patching. The CoE that was supposed to clear your backlog is busy keeping last year's automations alive.
The Citizen Developer Problem
The vendors saw the scaling problem coming. Their answer was citizen development — business users building their own automation with general-purpose low-code platforms.
The tools weren't the problem. The approach was.
Those platforms weren't built to understand automation. They don't know which elements in a workflow are sequence-critical. They don't capture selectors intelligently. They don't observe how a process actually works and structure it accordingly. A business user is left figuring all of that out with a drag-and-drop interface and no guidance.
GPA tools are built differently. The recorder observes how you work — which elements you interact with, in what order, which steps carry the real logic — and structures the automation from that understanding. Developer-grade intelligence, practitioner-facing. The hard parts that took developers years to master are built into the tool itself.
That's the difference. Not governance alone. The tool understands workflow.
The Last Mile Nobody Reaches
The CoE reaches structured, high-volume, IT-visible work — processes big enough to justify a formal project, stable enough to survive a bot, important enough to make the priority queue. That's not everything. Not even close.
What's left is the last mile: team-level processes, person-specific workflows, tasks too small for a formal CoE project but too large to keep doing manually.
A CoE developer — even a junior one at 6 to 8 LPA — cannot justify two to three weeks of work for a process that saves one person two hours a week. The economics don't work for a centralised team with 200 items in the queue.
Multiply that 2-hour task across a 500-person operations team. Tens of thousands of hours per year in manual work the CoE will never prioritise. Not because they don't care. Because they were never designed for the last mile.
That finance analyst running Monday morning reports? In the backlog. That HR coordinator processing quarterly onboarding documents? In the backlog. That ops manager compiling a weekly status from five systems? In the backlog.
Still manual. Two years in.
What GPA Actually Is
Guerrilla Process Automation is business-driven automation built by practitioners, governed by IT, supported by the CoE — without the wait.
The word guerrilla is intentional. Guerrilla strategy enters where conventional forces can't. Lightweight, adaptive, close to the ground. Not weaker — differently suited to different terrain.
Three things make it different from the approaches that failed:
Business-driven. The person who does the work builds the automation. They know the process better than any developer who'll spend three hours in a requirements meeting trying to understand it.
IT-governed. Not shadow IT. GPA runs on IT-approved infrastructure. Same procurement ticket, same approved browser, same managed laptop.
Tool-intelligent. Developer-grade intelligence, practitioner-facing. The platform understands workflow — not just records clicks. It captures what matters, structures it correctly, and handles what stops business users cold on every other tool.
Where It Fits
GPA isn't a replacement for RPA or the CoE. It's the extension that covers what they were never designed to reach.
The processes sitting in your queue — the ones your team has stopped asking about — that's the last mile. That's what GPA is for.
The automation gap isn't a technology problem. It's a distribution problem.
Written by
Pranav Neeli
12 years enterprise RPA — developer to architect to manager. Worked at Accenture, EY, Fossil, Alcon, HP. Now building Guerrilla Bots to fix the last mile.