We live in a world inhabited by robots, and the most useful may be those that exist outside the physical plane.

Robotic process automation has given us virtual assistants that quietly work behind the scenes; entering data, processing forms, answering calls, and even filing tax returns. These RPA bots are simplifying operations and increasing profits at thousands of companies around the world; and the COVID-19 pandemic has only increased their importance.

Current RPA adoption rates are faster than those for container, video conferencing, and even cloud. Twenty-two percent of customers planning RPA spend are new adopters of the technology, according to figures given in a recent report by Dave Vellante, chief analyst at Wikibon, SiliconANGLE Media’s sister market research company.

The buzzword du jour in RPA is hyperautomation, a term introduced by Gartner Inc. as one of its top 10 strategic trends for 2020. Where automation is the use of technology to free humans from low-level repetitive tasks, hyperautomation adds artificial intelligence and machine learning to automation processes, making bots smarter and increasing the use-case potential.

Grabbing the buzz word and running with it is RPA market leader UiPath Inc., which just announced general availability of its end-to-end hyperautomation platform as the core of the 20.4 release box set. As the first such platform on the market, it aims to democratize automation and put “automation squarely at the core of everyday work.”

Here’s Vellante’s breaking analysis of “RPA Gains Momentum in the Post COVID Era”:

More than ‘paving the cow path’

Automating existing processes is sometimes referred to as “paving the cow path” by critics who see RPA use as limited to mundane tasks. Changing the mindset from thinking of RPA as a platform rather than a point product opens the industry to a wider set of possibilities.

“Think about RPA not just as keyboard and mouse automations, but also benefiting from all of those APIs that exist, also being able to span the full spectrum of automation,” said Brandon Nott, senior vice president of product at UiPath Inc. “When we talk about the platform mindset, really our primary goal is to build something robust enough, flexible enough, reliable enough that any company can use it within their operation … [and] intuitive and understandable enough that anyone can pick an entry point and begin to use that platform.”

Nott was one of four UiPath executives who joined Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, via video link at theCUBE’s Boston studios for theCUBE’s UiPath Live Release Show: Post Event Analysis. The other three executives were Bobby Patrick, chief marketing officer; Ted Kummert, executive vice president of product and engineering; and Tarek Madkour, director of product management. The conversations covered the future of RPA, UiPath’s challenges and customer success stories, plans for an initial public offering, and the technology behind the company’s promise to provide ‘a robot for every person.’ (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the entire conversation with Brandon Nott below, including why UiPath is so confident in its vision to provide “a robot for every person”:

Now is the time to automate

COVID-19 has brought a reality check to companies that had not adopted new technologies that would enable fast and flexible reaction to the changing economic and social situation. RPA quickly rose to the forefront as a solution.

“The luxury of time has disappeared … [companies] can’t wait months and years for digital transformation. They have to do things in days and weeks. And that’s where our technology really comes into play,” Patrick said.

In just a month, UiPath had 50 new use cases in production. One example Patrick shared was the Cleveland Clinic. Demand for its coronavirus testing facilities parking lot was causing wait times of six to eight hours, but “by putting a robot in place, within two days they got that line down by 80% or 90%,” Patrick said.

The pandemic has also spurred a recent increase in adoption of RPA by government agencies. “New York state with Governor Cuomo became a big customer of ours,” Patrick said.

While the crisis is undoubtedly bad, speeding technological advances in the famously slow public sector is an unexpected benefit. “The crisis is always the mother of invention. We can always carry forward the good things that are coming out of this crisis situation,” Patrick said.

The increase in demand is great for the bottom line, and UiPath is entering second quarter with $20-plus million in deals that are likely to close, according to Patrick. This is “a 30% increase versus how many we have today alone, so our business is now well over 400 million in [annual recurring revenue],” he said. “The reality is we have a very, very strong business.”

Does this mean UiPath is still considering an initial public offering?

“We have an aggressive plan to build out our platform for hyperautomation to continue the growth … and to do that we’re going to want capital to fuel our ambitions and to fuel our ability to serve our customers,” Patrick said. “So, I think it’s likely; we’re here to be a long-term leader in this decade of automation.”

Here’s the full conversation with Bobby Patrick, including more in-depth analysis of UiPath’s financial outlook and IPO plans:

Enabling citizen developers

The 20.4 release “is the most ambitious thing that this company has ever done from a release perspective,” Kummert said. “We’re talking about 1,000 feature improvements, hundreds of discrete features, new products, as well as now our Automation Cloud has become generally available as well.”

Breaking down some of these features, Kummert described how the new evolution of UiPath’s Studio automation canvas, StudioX, adds intelligence to simplify building automations. “StudioX is really our way of enabling citizen developers … to get some automation work done on their own,” he said.

Customer input was important in the design, with some of the major features, the out-of-box templates, and the studio governance features developed from customer suggestions.

Automation Hub is another intelligence-laced feature that brings employee input into the automation development loop. It addresses the problem of how to determine which processes should be automated by gathering data in three different ways, giving a holistic systems view.

The first way is through crowd mining, a collaborative method of gathering data. It involves the community by basically just asking those who are actually doing the work what tasks they think are candidates for automation. Tools such as Task Capture enable employees to identify processes to submit for consideration.

“People across the company can then collaborate, eventually moving on building the best ideas,” Kummert said.

The second method, called process mining, focuses on big-picture operational processes, such as backend systems and enterprise resource planning. While the third, task mining, is more of an individual collaborative and front-end processes.

“Let’s watch the log of events there, let’s apply some machine learning processing to that, and say, ‘Here’s the repetitive things we’ve found,'” Kummert said.

While process and task mining are traditional methods of gathering data, the connection to an automation platform is a new and powerful idea, Kummert added.

Here’s the complete interview with Ted Kummert for more in-depth discussion on the automation lifecycle and UiPath’s AI and ML strategy:

Cloud wraps it all together

Underlying the features and updates in Release 20.4 is the company’s Automation Cloud. Key for customers wanting to adopt fast to cope with the challenges of COVID, the cloud “makes it easy for you to start instantly and scale later,” Madkour said.

UiPath takes care of the details under the hood, simplifying the steps to getting automations running and streamlining operations.

“When you start thinking about RPA … you want your automations to light up and to save you money and to cut time for you,” Madkour said. “Forget the infrastructure; leave that to us.”

A benefit of not being cloud native is that UiPath can offer multiple cloud deployment options. “If you want on-premises all the way, we got it. If you want cloud all the way, we got it. You want a hybrid system, we got it. We’re just going to make it possible for you, and the deployment choice is your choice,” Madkour added.

Aside from deployment choices, users can opt for either the free Community version of the Automation Cloud or the more comprehensive Enterprise version. The Community edition offers two attended and one unattended robots and connection to either the regular Studio or StudioX for automation design. Tens of thousands of small companies, teams and individuals actively use the Community version to create automations.

“It’s not a free trial or free limited time or something. It is just free as in free — free forever,” Madkour said.

The biggest difference between the Community and Enterprise versions of the Automation Cloud is UiPath’s uptime guarantee, 24/7 dedicated support team, and the option to purchase an infinite number of robots.

The company is confident in promising a very specific uptime assurance because of testing throughout a slow ramp-up of enterprise customers that started in mid-2019. “We’ve definitely been meeting our [service-level agreements] for five months running. Now, we feel very comfortable with the launch for the rest of the world,” Madkour said.

UiPath’s infrastructure is all based on Microsoft Azure, and the company uses Azure data centers throughout the system. This adds to the company’s service confidence, according to Madkour.

“Azure provides some very good uptime and reliability guarantees. And in addition to that, they have servers around the world that we can utilize so that we can expand,” he explained.

Learn more about UiPath’s Automation Cloud in this interview with Tarek Madkour:

Is a robot for every person a realistic goal?

Modesty hasn’t been a necessary characteristic for UiPath, as the company exploded from a tiny Romanian start-up to a global RPA super-power in a little over five years. But when UiPath’s founder and Chief Executive Officer Daniel Dines said the company’s goal was to change society by providing “a robot for every person,” there were some raised eyebrows. Comparing its statement to Bill Gates’ “a PC on every desk and in every home,” the company believes that changing the face of enterprise through at-scale automation is only the start of the possibilities for RPA.

“The bigger part of the story is really about how you bring RPA into the culture,” Nott said, emphasizing the uses of RPA outside the workplace. “Think about how taking advantage of automation or being able to write your own automations is beneficial.”

Nott’s son, who is currently in first grade, is already learning to code, providing proof of concept to his father’s words. “He’s doing loops and retries and step-based algorithmic teaching,” Nott said. “This is something that’s ubiquitous; this applies to everybody.”

But his son doesn’t have a personal robot. Not just yet.

There’s more coverage from SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE of the UiPath Live: The Release Show: Post Event Analysis. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for UiPath Live. Neither UiPath, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay