Cloud Wars is on location this week at the UiPath FORWARD customer conference in Las Vegas. Tom Smith, Editor in Chief, Cloud Wars, is joined by John Siefert, CEO, Dynamic Communities & Cloud Wars to discuss key insights from the UiPath FORWARD event in Las Vegas, focusing on the evolution of UiPath’s automation technologies, partnerships with SAP, and the importance of change management in AI implementation.
Highlights
UiPath’s Agent Technology Unveiled (00:22)
There are some amazing partnerships being announced at UiPath FORWARD, where around 4,000 people are in attendance. Additionally, UiPath has got an agent technology. It calls it enterprise agents, and it’s positioning agents as a way to direct the work of robots, but agents are given higher-level tasks than robots are.
Robots follow a set of rules whereas agents are smarter than that. They combine robots and manage workflows. Today, UiPath is taking it to the next level, and it’s adding something that it calls orchestration, which is orchestrating processes and then some agent builder technology. Tom thinks UiPath has a real leg up here because of its installed base.
The Rise of Agentic Automation (02:27)
UiPath took off just before COVID with its robotic process automation (RPA) technology, orchestrating numerous menial processes within mid-market and enterprise companies across various industries. It was essentially utilizing AI before it became a buzzword. Recently, there’s been a focus on the concept of “agentic automation,” which refers to AI agents that go beyond traditional chatbots like ChatGPT.
Taking action has definitely been a focus for UiPath, with an emphasis on agents seeking human input when they’re unsure about the correct course of action. What gives UiPath credibility is its approach; it’s not a traditional platform provider or a system of record like SAP or Microsoft. Instead, it accepts and encourage customers to bring their own agents and integrate them into more unified processes.
Strategic Partnership with SAP (05:45)
This partnership between UiPath and SAP is significant, and Tom will be conducting interviews with UiPath representatives to explore it further. SAP plans to embed various UiPath tools within its automation platform, which customers will use to design, build, optimize, and migrate their systems. As anyone familiar with SAP knows, migrating from on-premises to cloud-based ERP, specifically S/4HANA, poses numerous challenges. To address this, both companies are collaborating to allow customers to leverage UiPath technology through SAP and its partners.
Between UiPath and SAP, this partnership will be serving a big customer base, both in breadth and depth. The two companies are well-aligned throughout this collaboration. For instance, Tom explains, “It’s aligned very well with what SAP calls the clean core, which is their methodology to try to get customers migrated effectively without bringing over lots of technical debt, lots of custom code, so they’re definitely working together on that.”
Keynotes (07:20)
As part of UiPath CEO and founder Daniel Dines’ keynote, representatives from McKinsey spoke about how “10-15% of an AI project is technology, the rest is people, change, and rewiring the organization,” Tom reports. Another interesting point he made was to not apply AI and agent technology to a poorly functional process; get the process right. Dines’ keynote heavily focused on the agent technology and where that fits.
Final Thoughts (09:00)
There’s a lot of buzz around agents at UiPath FORWARD. Tom has noticed attendees asking many questions about agents, where they fit, how they’re going to work together, how they’re differentiated, how they’re different from copilots, and more.
There’s also a big focus on trust and governance. “The governance is especially applicable in this case because they’re, again, talking about unifying a series of robots, a series of agents, across processes,” Tom acknowledges. Trust is becoming even more important as UiPath expands its reach and takes on these very ambitious use cases and processes.
