Think a dedicated account in an old 3-tier architecture meant for a bot to login rather than a human. You're not making API calls though (at least not as we typically describe API calls), you're making HTTP requests to pull down a web page and then screen-scraping within the resulting HTML/JS.

Without a dedicated account your RPA bot needs to essentially impersonate a human or let the human login first and then drive the dashboard until the bot completes and the human can resume using their desktop seat. Very inconvenient for the human, and problematic for logging of who's really doing what.