SAP SE  has acquired Contextor SAS, a European robotic process automation (RPA) firm to help accelerate the development and expansion of its SAP Leonardo Machine Learning portfolio.

Contextor’s RPA technology relieves business software users from performing repetitive tasks and enables both attended and unattended RPA within and across applications. To date, Contextor’s customers have deployed more than 100,000 bots automating business processes.

RPA will help to simplify user interface interactions across SAP and non-SAP applications. Contextor’s RPA will be combined with SAP Cloud Platform and conversational AI technology and document processing capabilities provided by SAP Leonardo Machine Learning to deliver intelligent RPA, which SAP plans to include in key SAP solutions.

“With intelligent RPA accelerated by Contextor, businesses will be able to achieve the high automation level necessary to become intelligent enterprises,” said Markus Noga, head, machine learning, SAP.

“The acquisition is a big step towards orchestrating process automation and will help SAP inject RPA capabilities into our applications, first and foremost into SAP S/4HANA.”

The integration of intelligent RPA into SAP S/4HANA is expected in the first half of 2019. Other SAP applications will follow soon thereafter.

With Contextor’s RPA technology, SAP plans to automate half of all the business processes supported by its SAP ERP software over the next three years. Contextor, based in the Paris region, was founded in 2000 and is specialized in the research and development of RPA software to deliver clever, nimble and efficient application assistants, wizards and stand-alone bots.