UiPath Introduces Vision for the Future: Advancing AI with Agentic Automation

UiPath (NYSE: PATH), a leading provider of enterprise automation and AI software, unveiled its new vision focused on the next phase of enterprise automation—agentic automation.

Recognized for its cutting-edge robotic process automation (RPA) technology, UiPath is enhancing customer automation experiences through agentic automation. This innovative approach merges AI agents, robots, people, and models, facilitating comprehensive AI transformation across organizations. The strength of agentic automation lies in its ability to efficiently address a wide array of complex use cases across various industries, offering significant customization, adaptability, and cost-efficiency.

Agentic automation will leverage both robots and AI agents to perform work tasks. While robots excel at automating repetitive, rule-based tasks to enhance efficiency and minimize manual efforts, agents are adept at adapting to changes, making intelligent decisions, and managing complex, dynamic processes. This synergy between robots and agents broadens the scope of automation, driving business growth and enabling employees to concentrate on higher-value activities. Agents can accomplish critical tasks that were previously unfeasible to automate due to their capacity for independent action and dynamic decision-making.

“Agentic automation represents a natural progression from RPA,” stated Daniel Dines, Founder and CEO. “Since our foundation, we’ve empowered our clients to transform their businesses by mimicking human actions through robotic process automation. Now, we’re advancing enterprise automation with agents, enabling clients to automate comprehensive processes and seamlessly orchestrate workflows. This leads to improved business results, enhanced productivity, and increased direct benefits for customers through automation.” Agents can leverage the extensive automations developed by UiPath users and integrate with a wide range of enterprise applications, benefitting from the governance and control offered by the UiPath Platform, as well as high-reliability robots and human oversight for critical decisions.

To maximize the benefits of agentic workflows, it is crucial to orchestrate the collaboration among agents, robots, humans, and models. However, integrating unpredictable models into essential business workflows can be complex. UiPath aims to tackle these challenges through agentic orchestration, a process that facilitates the design, execution, monitoring, and optimization of intricate business processes from beginning to end. This approach enables clients to manage the entire lifecycle of processes—including automation, intelligent insights, modeling, and management—on a single platform, fostering collaboration between automation, AI agents, and humans for improved outcomes. By clarifying roles and responsibilities in workflows, agentic orchestration ensures compliance and predictable results while allowing for the adaptability that agents provide.

“Agentic automation will quickly become the primary way to integrate AI with rule-based technologies to enhance knowledge work,” noted Maureen Fleming from IDC. “The combination of Generative AI and AI agents offers knowledge workers substantial automation benefits, enabling them to perform their tasks more effectively and creating significant value across organizations.”

New Agentic Features in the UiPath Platform

During its annual FORWARD user conference in Las Vegas, UiPath showcased Agent Builder™, a tool designed for automation developers to create, evaluate, and publish enterprise agents that work in tandem with robots on the UiPath automation platform. As part of the UiPath Studio toolset, Agent Builder allows developers to create workflows and applications that integrate with agents.

Users can build agents from scratch or utilize pre-existing agents from the UiPath Agent Catalog. Additionally, customers will have the option to incorporate third-party agents into their workflows.

“Agents empower users to manage more intricate tasks and new scenarios, delivering significant value to our clients,” said Graham Sheldon, Chief Product Officer at UiPath. “By enabling customers to develop specialized agents through a user-friendly, low-code environment or pre-built templates, we facilitate the automation of new use cases, reduce costs, and help them maintain a competitive edge.”

Agent Builder is anticipated to be available for preview to the UiPath community in December 2024, with users encouraged to register for access.

Autopilot for Everyone Now Available for Free

UiPath also introduced Autopilot for Everyone, a cross-platform Generative AI conversational agent designed to boost productivity for all employees. This tool allows users to leverage UiPath’s agents and workflow automation, enabling anyone—regardless of technical expertise—to handle complex tasks, analyze documents, automate data entry, and execute various automations. Autopilot for Everyone features an intuitive conversational interface, customizable prompts, extensive automation libraries, and specialized AI models for tasks like document comprehension and semantic data handling.

Organizations benefit from UiPath’s security and governance framework, as Autopilot operates within the UiPath AI Trust Layer, which simplifies the management and governance of AI model deployment and data usage. This cross-platform solution is compatible with both Windows and Mac.

“We are committed to democratizing this technology, having witnessed its immense value for our clients,” said Sheldon. “We are excited to help eliminate barriers to the widespread adoption of agentic automation, enabling everyone to experience the numerous advantages that Autopilot offers in daily operations.”