UiPath Inc. today announced a preview of its upcoming Agent Builder tool as it outlined its vision to combine its expertise in robotic process automation with generative artificial intelligence models and accelerate enterprise automation to the next level.

The new tool was unveiled at UiPath’s annual user conference, UiPath Forward 2024 in Las Vegas. The company said it’ll launch in preview in December as part of its UiPath Studio developer tool suite. It will give developers everything they need to design, build, evaluate and publish AI-powered agents that can collaborate with its traditional process automation robots.

The company is pushing the “agentic automation” narrative, which is focused on AI agents that go further than traditional chatbots such as ChatGPT. AI agents are designed not only to understand questions and requests and generate answers or suggestions, but also to take actions on behalf of users, essentially automating various aspects of their work.

UiPath made its name in the area of robotic process automation, which is a subset of AI that’s focused on machine automation. Its platform provides tools that enterprises can use to automate repetitive business tasks such as data entry. They work by studying how human workers complete these tasks, so they can replicate the process, freeing up those employees to carry out higher-level work.

“UiPath is going through another transition,” said Dave Vellante, chief analyst at the SiliconANGLE sister market research firm theCUBE Research. “It led the RPA market where it was an innovator and now it has an opportunity to evolve as a leader in agent-based automation.”

RPA and generative AI will work better together

At UiPath Forward, the startup explained, its robots are best suited for carrying out repetitive, rule-based tasks in order to improve business efficiency and reduce manual effort. On the other hand, AI agents are better at adapting to new challenges, making intelligent decisions and handling complex, multistep processes. In other words, they do quite different things.

According to UiPath, “agentic automation” refers to the combination of RPA robots, AI agents, humans and AI models, and it believes it has the potential to expand the scope and impact of automation in enterprise environments. By combining AI agents with its robots, UiPath says, it will enable the automation of more complex tasks that were previously impossible for anyone but humans to perform. They’ll also be able to make intelligent decisions on behalf of users, the company said.

UiPath founder and Chief Executive Daniel Dines said agentic automation is the next evolution of RPA and will help customers to automate entire business processes from start to finish.

He explained that AI agents can leverage the millions of automation developed by UiPath’s customers to integrate with thousands of enterprise applications. At the same time, those agents will adhere to the strict governance controls provided by UiPath’s platform.

The company also spoke about its concept of agentic orchestration, which is a process that governs the design, implementation, operation, monitoring and optimization of agentic AI workflows. Customers will be able to manage the entire process lifecycle, from start to finish, from within UiPath’s platform, ensuring that humans can work together with AI agents in a compliant way.

With the UiPath Agent Builder, developers will be able to build AI agents that can incorporate its RPA bots to automate various advanced business processes. They’ll be able to access a number of prebuilt agents in the UiPath Agent Catalog, or build their own from scratch, and they can also choose to integrate third-party AI agents.

“I think of RPA as the plumbing in agentic automation,” Vellante said. “It’s necessary but not sufficient for success. Traditional robots will become commoditized in my view as the value moves up the intelligence value chain toward agents and control frameworks that manage and execute against corporate goals.”

International Data Corp. analyst Maureen Fleming said agentic automation is about the convergence of AI and rule-based automation technologies. “The combination of generative AI and AI agents will be the first time that knowledge workers can meaningfully gain the benefits of automation to help them do their jobs, creating the next level of value from automation across enterprises,” she said.

UiPath’s Autopilot goes live

Generative AI was a recurring theme across all of UiPath’s announcements at Forward today, with the company also announcing general availability of its new Autopilot tool, a conversational agent designed to enhance worker productivity.

The UiPath Autopilot provides a conversational interface that makes it simple for any employee to take advantage of the company’s agents and workflow automations. They’ll be able to use it to find answers to their questions, grounded in the company’s own data, analyze documents, automate copy pasting across applications and more.

Better still, customers will be able to choose from a range of large language models under the hood. One of the first available is Anthropic PBC’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which integrates with Autopilot as well as other UiPath products, including Clipboard Ai and a new medical record summarization tool announced today.

Another option will be Inflection AI Inc.’s Inflection AI Enterprise, which is a security-focused LLM that’s aimed at highly regulated industries. Rather than run in the cloud, it uses Intel Corp.’s Gaudi 3 processors to process data on-premises, ensuring confidential data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

UiPath has some interesting opportunities in that it is a founder-led company with strong integrations, low-code chops and a strong vision,” Vellante said. “Now it has to put these together, along with its partnerships, to deliver. I’m curious to see how UiPath responds to this latest challenge.”

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