Automating Windows software that has no API

The automation advice you find assumes your software has an API. An enormous amount of the software people actually work in does not, and never will.

The gap nobody covers

Search for how to automate a business process and you get integration platforms, webhooks and API keys. That advice is fine when your tools are modern SaaS. It is useless for the accounting package installed on one PC in the back office, the insurance portal that predates responsive design, or the internal tool a contractor wrote in 2011 and nobody has touched since.

These are not edge cases. For a lot of small businesses they are the entire working day.

The three usual options, and why they stall

1. Record a macro

Macro recorders replay fixed coordinates and keystrokes. They break the moment a window opens at a different size, a dialog appears, or a list has a different number of rows — which is to say, almost immediately.

2. Buy an RPA platform

UiPath and Power Automate Desktop genuinely solve this, and they are the right answer at scale. But they are built around a developer building and maintaining flows, licensing runs into thousands per year, and a five-person firm is not going to staff that.

3. Hire someone to do it manually

Which is what most firms actually do, and why data entry is still a job.

The fourth option: an agent that looks at the screen

A vision-based agent does not integrate with the software at all. It takes a screenshot, works out what is on screen, and drives the mouse and keyboard the way a person would. Because it re-reads the screen at each step rather than replaying coordinates, a moved window or an unexpected dialog is something it can adapt to instead of something that breaks it.

You describe the task in plain language — “open each invoice in this folder, take the total and the date, put them in a new sheet” — and watch it work.

Where it is genuinely good

• Repetitive tasks with a clear definition of done
• Moving data between two systems with no integration
• Filling long forms from a source document
• Anything you can explain to a new hire in two sentences

Where it is not

• Open-ended judgement calls
• Visually ambiguous or very dense interfaces, where it can misread and needs correcting
• Anything expensive or irreversible that you would leave running unattended — supervise those

Being straight about the second list matters more than the first. An agent that is right most of the time and supervised is useful. An agent you were told was infallible, left alone, and which quietly filed forty things wrong, is worse than doing it yourself.

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