SAP has announced the acquisition of RPA innovator Contextor SAS, which the company says will help with the development of its SAP Leonardo Machine Learning portfolio.

Contextor’s technology makes it easier for businesses to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up resource for employees to develop new products and services instead. It’s based upon bots, with software distributed to key business-as-usual (BAU) tasks and applications, ensuring innovation remains at the heart of everything, they do.

To date, Contextor customers have deployed more than 100,000 bots to save their businesses valuable resources, time and money.

“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 of machine learning at 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.”

SAP expects Contextor’s technology to be deployed to customers in the first half of 2019. It’ll first be integrated into the company’s SAP S/4HANA, with other platforms following later in the year. SAP hopes up to half of all its customers’ processes deployed on SAP ERP software will be automated over the next three years.

SAP is investing heavily into AI and machine learning at the moment, making it easier for businesses to gain insights from customers, reduce the manpower needed to keep businesses ahead of the curve and boosting productivity. Last week, it acquired experience management firm Qualtrics for $8 billion and back in January, it bought chatbot business Recast.ai. That’s on top of its other purchases – Coresystems and Callidus Cloud.