In today’s AI-powered economy, UiPath is a top-tier technology provider that helps enterprises transform operations by increasing productivity, improving performance, and delivering better customer experiences through automation — a technology it has pioneered — plus AI.
UiPath serves approximately 11,000 customers worldwide and is ranked number 8 on the Acceleration Economy list of AI Ecosystem Top 12 Pioneers. This analysis explores the company’s positioning, differentiators, and its approach to working with partners and customers to deliver maximum benefits from automation and AI.
Company Background
Founded in Romania in 2005, UiPath was an innovator in automation technology long before AI took the tech industry by storm. Its software for years has allowed customers to automate repetitive tasks, setting the stage for today’s positioning focused on AI-powered automation.
In 2013, UiPath introduced a new technology category, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which monitors user activity to automate manual tasks; RPA has significantly improved the efficiency of front- and back-office work while enhancing speed and performance of business processes.
Today, UiPath is a publicly-traded company with headquarters in New York City, more than 4,000 employees, and revenues exceeding $1.3 billion.
Technology Innovations
UiPath’s core offering is its Business Automation Platform, which provides AI-powered automation tools and infrastructure within enterprise processes, bringing AI into workflows and decision streams. It supports:
- Discover capabilities help assess and understand where opportunities for improvement, efficiency, and advancement exist. This includes process mining, task mining, communications mining, and automation management features.
- Automate capabilities that focus on rapidly building AI-powered automations to transform every facet of work. This includes a Studio for automating and testing complex scenarios, an Apps builder for low-code software, AI-powered robots, a GenAI Autopilot, intelligent document automation, as well as several other apps and functions.
- Operate capabilities that focus on developing the framework to run and optimize a highly scalable, mission-critical automation program. This includes an automation and application test manager, centralized orchestration of automations, insights to track and measure automation performance, and an AI Center to enhance automations with machine learning (ML) models.
I’ve chosen three of the company’s applications within the platform to highlight in more detail below:
UiPath Autopilots: Streamline Processes With GenAI
Autopilots, also referred to in the tech industry as copilots or AI assistants, appear to be an unstoppable force. UiPath Autopilot delivers the power of GenAI to employees’ desktops, empowering every person to work faster, smarter, and more strategically. Autopilots are offered for developers, testers, business analysts, and general business users. They can discover and run existing automations. They can use automations as building blocks, stringing them together to accomplish advanced actions. When there is no pre-built automation for what a user is trying to do, AI can create new ones. This is a significant value proposition in terms of driving automation outcomes.
The company announced last week that its Autopilot is being integrated with Copilot for Microsoft 365, which lets joint customers automate business processes directly within Microsoft Teams. Customers will have access to a library to select and run automations that complete common, repetitive tasks, along with specialized automations for function- or industry-specific tasks.
UiPath Process Mining: Discovering a Gold Mine of ROI and Productivity
UiPath process mining identifies specific gaps and opportunities for process improvement, cutting through the noise generated by known and unknown processes. This capability is vital to delivering ROI and productivity improvements from AI, RPA, and enterprise software investments.
To underline this point, look at the results for Isbank, Turkey’s largest commercial bank. Before introducing automation, process mining helped the company discover pockets of value that would otherwise remain hidden. In one process, the company used process mining to eliminate unnecessary steps and saved 116,000 hours’ worth of work.
UiPath’s technology has been included as part of Acceleration Economy’s in-depth analysis of the process mining category.
UiPath Apps: Low-Code Development for Rapid Automation
The UiPath Apps low-code platform enables customers to build custom applications that connect to a company’s core systems to access required data in real time. Data can be shared across any application or automated process, providing the speed and scale needed in today’s dynamic businesses that maintain and operate a wide range of systems.
Fiserv, a global fintech and payments provider, used UiPath Apps to cut the handling times for its contact center in half. One Fiserv executive described the UiPath-created apps as “…like going from paper processes to computers.”
Ecosystem Partnerships
UiPath works with thousands of technology and business partners specializing in specific industries, application categories, and regions. Ecosystem partners are organized by type: business, public sector, and technology.
Like most partners ecosystems, UiPath has a tiered set of alliances: Platinum, Gold, Authorized, and Certified. Each partner’s designation is based on its experience with automation and AI, mastery of UiPath software, and the level of customers they serve.
UiPath natively integrates with enterprise technology partners to improve the performance of popular cloud and software applications and to develop, extend, and automate new processes across a company. This group includes all of the Cloud Wars Top 10. In addition, its partnerships extend to specialty applications including Outsystems for business process management (BPM), BeyondTrust for security and compliance, and DocuSign for its embedded electronic signature capability.
UiPath’s partners ecosystem also features top-tier business and strategy consultancies including Accenture, Cognizant, and EY.
Innovior is an example of a UiPath “Award Winner” business partner. It uses UiPath’s Business Automation platform and products to serve higher education, energy, engineering, government, telecom, financial services, and healthcare markets. The 150-person company’s services focus on applying intelligent AI and automation for business process optimization.
Customer Successes
According to its latest annual report, UiPath’s 11,000 customers run the gamut of industries; I’d like to highlight a couple that I find noteworthy.
Dentsu, a leading global business transformation and communications agency, uses UiPath to automate repetitive finance, human resources, and client services tasks. This helps reduce manual effort and minimize errors in managing client campaigns and internal processes.
For example, automation applied to Dentsu’s Google Search Console checks URL errors of web pages to make life easier for Dentsu’s search engine optimization (SEO) teams: 95 percent of manual verification and reporting has been removed, according to Flo Ye, Dentsu’s director of automation. The companies are working together to “democratize automation” and make it accessible to every employee using UiPath’s Automation Cloud. This co-creation initiative promises to identify, apply, and measure automation for any business process, in or across regions, to increase employee productivity, speed, and performance.
Another prominent customer is E. & J. Gallo, a U.S.-based winery and spirits distributor. The company has been working with UiPath for about five years. The work started with automating data transfer and management for its ERP systems, with a focus on financial processes to prove the concept. Once this automation was proven to deliver error-free and help focus employees on higher-value tasks, the two companies worked together to establish a standard process for identifying new automation opportunities, according to Robert Barrios, E. & J. Gallo’s Information Technology Vice President. The Gallo RPA team takes a “first-ready, first-serve” approach. Any employee or team requesting automation must have a process outline, definition, and value statement. This vetting and mindset ensure each initiative delivers tangible results and reduces risk.
Analyst Perspective
UiPath is in a strong position to leverage its history and experience in automation to deploy AI for diverse enterprises. With a nearly 20-year history and thousands of customer relationships, the company can leverage its existing technology and continue developing software that capitalizes on its broad range of business and technology partnerships. A robust, expansive partners network, embodied in its marketplace, provides the ecosystem to work closely with customers to co-create solutions and new products.
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