Robotic process automation company UiPath Inc. today announced a major update to its platform that it says will enable true “hyperautomation” for its enterprise customers.

Having secured more than a billion dollars in venture capital funding, UiPath is one of the darlings of the booming RPA market. It’s an emerging subset of artificial intelligence that uses software robots to observe workflows in common business applications and then deduce ways to automate repetitive tasks.

UiPath makes it easy to create software “robots” that monitor users’ individual keystrokes as they interact with applications such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management, identifying repetitive patterns and suggesting ways to automate them. Eliminating a few keystrokes may seem trivial, but the savings can be enormous when applied to hundreds or thousands of users over long periods of time. Automation also reduces errors and improves speed.

Today’s updates build upon the company’s vision of “A Robot for Every Person,” which was first announced by its Chief Executive Officer Daniel Dines (pictured) during the company’s FORWARD III event in October. With it, UiPath aims to eliminate mundane and repetitive employee tasks by getting robots to perform them instead.

UiPath’s new Platform for Hyperautomation complements the UiPath Automation Cloud, and brings the company one step closer to realizing its vision by scaling automation across entire organizations. The platform relies on process discovery tools and employee crowdsourcing to determine which tasks can be automated. In turn, that enables more sophisticated automation with artificial intelligence capabilities such as document understanding, as well as more accurate analytics that businesses can use to measure the impact of their automation efforts, the company said.

With the UiPath Platform for Hyperautomation, companies can now use AI-based analytics to gain a better understanding of their back-end systems and critical business applications. For example, the UiPath Process Mining feature can be used to create visualizations that illustrate business processes and how they should be automated.

Other updates include UiPath Document Understanding AI, which uses AI to extract and interpret data from various kinds of business documents. Meanwhile, UiPath Assistant gives workers the ability to schedule reminders for running attended automations. Background processes give the attended robots the ability to run multiple automations concurrently to monitor events or process jobs, the company said.

Another new feature is UiPath StudioX, which enables business users to identify and automate various tasks by themselves, without any need for developer assistance. Related to that is the new UiPath AutomationHub feature, which enables employees to suggest their own ideas about how automation can be applied.

The UiPath Platform for Hyperautomation also enables companies to apply AI to analyze how employees get their work done. It works by capturing, analyzing and prioritizing business processes according to how much value automation can bring.

“We’re making it easy for more professionals across the enterprise to interact with robots, including citizen developers, business analysts and end-users,” said Param Kahlon, chief product officer at UiPath. “Now every company can think more broadly, involve more employees and confidently scale their Automation Centers of Excellence.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that UiPath’s new capabilities look promising, and that it should have no trouble in getting users to adopt the new platform.

“From an architecture and capability perspective, this should be a downhill battle for UiPath, as the mix of AI, cloud and RPA is an attractive one for companies looking to facilitate enterprise acceleration during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Mueller said.

Alongside today’s update, UiPath is now offering a new deployment option for its main Automation Cloud platform. The company’s flagship offering is now available on a software-as-a-service basis, and gives enterprises more choices besides the existing on-premises, private and public cloud deployment options.

Dines appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during last year’s FORWARD III event, where he talked more about the company’s vision of “A Robot for Every Person”:

Photo: SiliconANGLE