In this Innovation Podcast, Acceleration Economy AI Ecosystem host Toni Witt chats with Graham Sheldon, chief product officer, UiPath, and Daniel Dines, co-founder and chief innovation officer, UiPath, about the company’s latest innovations and vision for AI.
Highlights
UiPath Overview (00:26)
UiPath is a business automation platform providing AI and automation software to help companies accelerate growth, operate efficiently, and transform how people get their work done. The company has over 10,000 customers globally and 4,000 employees. UiPath reports $1.46 billion in annual recurring revenue.
Referring to UiPath’s vision, Dines shares that the company “believe[s] AI and automation belong together — and it’s the best way to increase productivity at work…and also the happiness of employees.” UiPath is positioned to bring AI to life in enterprises. The combination of AI and automation helps many of UiPath’s customers achieve greater overall end-to-end process automation.
UiPath’s Vision for AI at Work (02:57)
Trust is a top element of UiPath’s vision for AI at Work. “For AI to be useful at work, you have to trust it,” Sheldon says. Trust involves knowing who has access to what data, how that data is being used, and having appropriate guardrails in place. Context, action, and new models are also vital elements. Without context around critical information from inputs, the AI wouldn’t be able to make the best decisions or deliver the best results.
UiPath has ensured its automation platform is equipped to tailor automation for specific contexts with its AI models. The company recently announced its own family of models that it’s training with unique data, but Sheldon notes that it’s important to have an open and flexible approach to build connectors across various models to best meet customer needs.
Customer Examples (06:12)
Dines provides customer examples that demonstrate the business impact, ROI, and use cases of UiPath’s offerings, including:
- Intel uses UiPath for product quote predictions on shipments that need to be cleared by customs
- A large independent investment bank leverages UiPath and GenAI to automate tedious tasks, improving efficiency
- HUB International deployed GenAI models with UiPath to process millions of documents
- Wesco uses UiPath’s Clipboard AI to help employees process purchase order receipts
Advancements in Contextual AI and Model Integration (10:47)
UIPath added context grounding to its AI trust layer. The RAG pattern or ability to bring in business-specific data to produce better responses from GenAI is now possible. Businesses can make generative AI much more accurate now. It also introduced the first two UiPath large language models (LLMS), DocPath and ComPath, for document understanding and communications mining, respectively.
UiPath Autopilot: Transforming Automation with AI (12:49)
Autopilot is UiPath’s assistant for natural language capabilities built directly into the product for developers and testers. That’s now in public preview. That will be available for everyone in June. It’s had thousands of organizations already try it, creating apps and documents, helping them do coding, and creating business logic in the apps.
Evolution toward End-to-End Business Automation (14:46)
While UiPath started as a robotic process automation (RPA) company, in 2019 it realized that RPA was not enough to deliver on end-to-end process automation. Now it includes process mining, machine learning, generative AI, test automation, API integration, and low-code apps and workflows. That comes from the natural evolution and customers’ desire to go from task automation to end-to-end process automation. Companies don’t just want to automate discrete tasks, but rather to transform workflows essential to business, like customer onboarding, procure-to-pay, or claim processing.
Empower Generative AI with Automation (17:02)
Generative AI is a necessity; it’s highly complementary to automation. Generative AI takes automation to the next level. UiPath believes that in the not-so-distant future, most processes will be described in natural language, maybe with some drawings and charts. There will be AI models that can interpret the process description, and they will orchestrate across other specialized AI models, automations, and people. It is working hard to build its own version of foundational models that will make this new way of working a reality. UiPath is well-positioned to advance in this domain.
Forecasting Tomorrow (18:43)
What will the businesses of 2030, 2040, 2050 look like? It’s a special time to be in the industry. Things are moving so quickly. What it means to be a developer and a salesperson is going to change. There’s so much waste right now because people are not focusing on solving problems; they’re focusing on data entry and trying to get data from one place to another. AI plus automation is where it’s at.
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