Artificial intelligence has propelled many enterprise sectors, but perhaps none faster than the field of robotic process automation, or RPA.

A recent Gartner Inc. report found that the RPA market grew 63% in 2018, making it the fastest-growing enterprise software category. And the market leader, according to Gartner, is UiPath Inc.

Founded out of Romania in 2005, the company has refined the art of bringing automation to mundane, laborious enterprise tasks. It has claimed half of the top 50 Fortune Global 500 as customers and has implemented RPA solutions across a wide range of industries, from healthcare and insurance to telecommunications and banking.

Fueling that rapid growth and customer adoption is an important technology development: AI has become a key ingredient in running any major business today.

“When I first joined UiPath two years ago, when we put RPA and AI in the same sentence people laughed,” said Bobby Patrick (pictured), chief marketing officer of UiPath. “A year ago, we said that RPA is really the path to AI in business operations. Now, we say that we’re the most highly valuable AI company in the world, and no one has ever disagreed.”

Patrick spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during three separate interviews at theCUBE’s studio in Boston. They discussed customer use cases for RPA technology, a recent study that addressed concerns over job replacement by robots, computer algorithms that drive UiPath’s solution and the company’s inaugural conference where the latest developments in business automation are expected to be announced. (* Disclosure below.)

Here’s the first interview with Patrick (see the full transcript of the first of the three interviews here):

Solving a 46-year problem

What does RPA actually mean for the enterprise world? UiPath’s work with the Singaporean telecommunications company Singtel Group offers an instructive example.

Singtel ran an internal hackathon that required the use of robotic process technology to find and solve company issues. Patrick received a note from the firm’s chief executive about the results.

“The employee who won the hackathon had been there 46 years,” Patrick said. “The robot solved a problem that drove her nuts every week of her career, and she was thrilled. He said they were now a believer in a robot for every Singtel employee.”

Another example can be found in the multinational energy company Chevron Corp. For many years, the firm’s Canadian operation manually tabulated crucial data from its oil rigs, which resulted in an overwhelming mass of PDF files. The process was laborious and plagued by errors.

In partnership with Microsoft Corp., UiPath configured its software to capture the necessary data and interpret it in much the same way as humans. “Working with Microsoft AI and UiPath RPA, they were able to automate that entire process,” Patrick said. “That’s applying AI to a massive problem for them.”

No grave fears around job loss

The specter of robots in the workplace inevitably leads to fear that companies will computerize jobs, sending hardworking people straight to the unemployment line. The Economist recently released a survey, sponsored by UiPath, that addressed this concern with over 500 executives in eight counties.

The results showed that those interviewed had no grave fears of employee displacement by AI. Rather, there was a strong belief that the technology could ultimately drive human achievement.

“What we see in terms of the results and data is that the increase in productivity actually drives a more efficient and satisfied workforce,” Patrick noted. “This is about doing the work we hate. Nobody misses the work that robots do.”

Here’s the second interview with Patrick (see the full transcript here):

Seeing the world like humans

With the help of AI-powered software, robots are now capable of seeing the world as humans do and taking appropriate action in response. This is enabled through UiPath’s AI Computer Vision, the latest version of which was placed in public preview in February.

The Computer Vision algorithm enables human-like recognition of user interfaces, such as elements on a computer screen, handwriting, and various forms of unstructured data, while being able to contextualize what is being registered visually.

“It’s how a robot looks at a screen the way a human does, which is very difficult,” Patrick explained. “We bring it all together. We make it easy to automate and create the data flow of a process.”

UiPath’s success and rapid growth of RPA have fueled a clear turn in the direction of enterprise automation. A new study released last week from Information Services Group Inc. found that the number of enterprises using cognitive technology more than doubled in the last year.

Rise of experienced-based automation

This is giving rise to the dawn of the “automation era,” according to Patrick. It’s a natural outgrowth of digital transformation as companies begin to apply machine-learning algorithms to data and transition from rules-based to experience-based automation.

“The automation-first era has a very similar look to it,” Patrick said. “It is about rapid agility, mass productivity, complete company transformation. It’s going to completely change the landscape of how companies work over the next 20 years.”

The growing community surrounding UiPath will gather in October for the company’s first-ever “UiPath Forward” event in Las Vegas. While careful not to divulge details of the numerous announcements expected to be made at the conference, Patrick did indicate that the company is working on a new version of an Excel interface for its users.

UiPath has apparently also been expanding more than its customer base in 2019. The company could unveil recent additions it has made through acquisition.

“We have made some acquisitions that we have not announced,” Patrick said.

The RPA firm has been on the fast track in the enterprise software world. It shot from $1 million in annual recurring revenue in 2014 to $100 million in 2017. UiPath also confirmed three months ago that it closed a Series D round of $568 million, which has driven it to a post-money valuation of $7 billion.

That’s not bad for a firm that two years ago generated laughter for Patrick when RPA and AI were mentioned in the same sentence. No one is laughing now.

“This is the gift that keeps on giving,” Patrick said. “If we did not have that connection to machine learning or AI, I think the enthusiasm level of a majority of our customers would not be anywhere near what it is today.”

Here’s the third interview with Patrick (see the full transcript here), part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: UiPath Inc. sponsored these segments of theCUBE. Neither UiPath nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE