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Technology percolates. Successful IT tends to diffuse, disseminate and filter outwards and upwards throughout its user base. Once any given application or data service reaches a certain critical mass, its founders and leaders often seek to diversify the spectrum of use cases and user competency levels that it can be applied to. It’s a basic law of economics not a million miles away from price differentiation and product diversification, when you have more customers all gravitating around a central brand proposition, then the business can generally be said to be on a trajectory for growth.
Enterprise automation company UiPath is taking some of those market-facing precepts forward with the current development of its platform. The company openly states that it is on a ‘mission to up-level knowledge work’ in order for people to work more creatively, collaboratively and strategically. In this case, that means making workplace automation functions more ubiquitous and more accessible for not just software application development professionals and data scientists, but for business laypersons too.
Autopilots in software
Still falling broadly under the category of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) although not using the term quite as openly as directly as the company used to, these are technologies designed to shoulder definable, measurable, repeatable and manageable workplace tasks from basic forms-based work onwards to what are becoming increasingly more complex tasks.
The company’s latest platform developments include Artificial Intelligence (AI) features with a branded offering known as UiPath Autopilot. This is a combined integration of generative AI (gen-AI), specialized AI (functions designed to provide intelligence inside what are often smaller closed-loop spaces that offer industry or domain-specific intelligence and are typically more secure in terms of their access to mission-critical data) and automation that allows any user to automate work using human natural language.
For the official UiPath definition of specialized AI, the company details this as, “AI solutions that include models which users to understand screens, mine tasks, process documents and utilize unique and proprietary data sets within enterprise workflows. Specialized AI can be securely trained with a customer’s data and optimized for its specific needs, resulting in fast, accurate and tailored solutions that are cost-effective to operate and that deliver high value outcomes.”
So how does it work? The company says that UiPath Autopilot can transform paper documents into automation-powered apps with a single user click. Delivered as AI features within the UiPath Business Platform, these enterprise-grade capabilities are engineered to a) take the grunt work out of business and b) now that we have evolved somewhat with automation in general, to enable people (and in some cases machines) to work smarter in the first place. At the risk of using that dreaded term ‘digital transformation’, this is the type of work that is now labelled as a ‘process enhancement opportunity’ for workplace role execution spanning most (if not all) industry verticals. In other words, it actually is digital transformation i.e. human tasks, now digitized.
“UiPath enables AI at work through intelligent automation solutions built with best-in-class generative AI and a library of specialized AI models adhering to principles of open, flexible and responsible AI. With an open approach, UiPath empowers customers to leverage the entire AI ecosystem to devise AI-driven automations, delivering actionable, measurable results,” notes the company, in a technical product statememt.
User-base spread widens
As we have suggested from the start here, UiPath is following a platform development trajectory that sees it both widen and broaden its user base. Looking to now serve the needs of businesspeople, software engineers, automation specialists and higher-level business analysts, the percolation process here has been undertaken with what appears to be a sympathetic regard for different user groups.
Although something of a generalization, software application developers are used to thinking about multi-level algorithmic-based calculations, problems and solutions in a more concurrent way than most businesspeople – who may, sweeping generalizations notwithstanding – be focused one task at a time.
While many employees in the commercial function of any business may be great multi-task workers, the company has built Autopilot for UiPath Assistant to provide an AI companion to partner with any user to tackle tasks. This includes Clipboard AI, a time-saving feature for copying and pasting complex data between applications. These AI tools are said to decrease the time typically needed to accomplish data-intensive work and tedious tasks like copying & pasting, summarizing, scheduling and drafting documents.
For developers – in UiPath Apps, generative AI-powered experiences help software engineers to create workflows, generate expressions, build automations and create [more fully-blown] automation-powered apps from PDFs or images. Autopilot for UiPath Studio gives both professional automation developers and citizen developers a chance to create and test automations with natural language. For automation testing – the platform helps testing teams continuously improve automations and applications by generating AI-powered test cases.
In terms of wider development, there is also work here designed to address the needs of ‘business analysts’ - a term that may loosely encompass blue-suited management consultants, yellow-shirted IT analysts, tan-shoe-wearing sales and selection consultants and more – who will also now get a key new autopilot automation advantage. UiPath Autopilot for Process Mining is designed to enable business-level analyst professionals to use keyboard-typed natural language to filter, summarize and create dashboards for their automation projects. Additionally, Autopilot for Communications Mining gives automation Center of Excellence (virtual zones designed to foster collaboration on automation best practice) teams with tools to uncover automation opportunities through natural language prompts.
Can we trust automation?
The company also announced its UiPath AI Trust Layer, a management framework for the governance of data, user interactions with UiPath Gen AI features and Large Language Models (LLMs). The company insists that AI Trust Layer gives users the confidence, visibility and governance they need to to responsibly manage the use of generative AI within UiPath.
“The latest AI innovations from UiPath provide users with critical context that acts as a compass for the next best actions, such as a chat with a customer for a service modification, paying a supplier’s invoice in a new operating region, or guiding inter-business processes,” underlines UiPath, in its product development notes.
Are we at a something of a seminal moment and strategic inflexion point with automation that stems from the world of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) yet? It’s very hard to say. In technology circles, RPA has long surpassed its most basic ‘screen scraping’ procedures designed to simply copy what human users are doing inside apps and auto-fill text fields and so much more. In business circles, there may be rather more of a perception gap to fill – hence UiPath’s clearly visible approach aligned to democratize and widen the scope of automation use in both general and specific terms, as showcased here – and that process is ongoing.
Given that the automation term itself is not wholly understood to mean more than a robotic arm movement in the physical world, we’re still crossing the chasm in some places. Add that reality to the fact that software automations (plural, because you can of course have more than one), still shows up as a spelling error in many apps, then you can see why this story (and more) needs to be told.
