Delivering AI strategies for business success

Over 50% of enterprises plan to incorporate both artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in 2023. Businesses are waking up to the value of combining machine efficiency and human-like AI to automate some of their most challenging and costly processes.

Look at your closest competitor. Chances are that either your business or theirs will leverage AI and automation for business transformation. So, who’s going to be first?

I’m Luke Palamara. For the last 10 years, I led product management for IBM® Watson natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval products. Now, I couldn’t be more excited to have joined UiPath to lead product management for our AI products.

UiPath is actively finding new ways to unlock AI’s potential for business transformation. We use AI to help businesses automate more, empower employees to be more productive, and to understand and improve their work. But we also give businesses access to powerful AI through a platform that’s open, flexible, and enterprise ready. That means giving our customers the freedom to combine our built-in AI with their own custom models and third-party tools. All backed by intelligent guardrails and the strongest security, governance, and compliance standards.

Today, I’ll start by explaining the different AI technologies at the core of the UiPath Business Automation Platform.

Seeing the potential of computer vision 

AI has been core to our platform’s capabilities for several years now. Computer vision is a great example of that.

For automation to be possible, robots need to see and understand everything you’re automating. Computer vision delivers that, enabling robots to read computer screens like a human does.

AI Computer Vision technology is our most widely used AI capability. It allows robots to process user desktops using our best-in-class optical character recognition (OCR) engine, control detection, and table detection. Users can also easily automate scrollable content and extract scrollable tables.

AI Computer Vision is game changing because it means UiPath robots can complete automation tasks with a level of understanding previously known only to humans. Available on the UiPath Platform, AI Computer Vision empowers robots to automate the tasks people hate, so we can all get back to doing the kind of jobs we love.

Document Understanding: taking the pain out of document processing

We believe no one should be stuck doing boring, repetitive document-based work. That's why we’ve harnessed AI to enable more advanced and sophisticated automation.

Intelligent document processing (IDP) aims to free employees from the drudgery of document processing. It uses a blend of AI technologies (all available on the UiPath Platform) to see and understand documents like humans do. AI enables IDP tools to extract useful data from masses of documents, quickly and reliably. 

UiPath Document Understanding uses various technologies, from OCR to handwriting recognition and AI. It uses machine learning (ML) to learn how to read and interpret different document types and templates. And, with our built-in validation station, you always have a human in the loop to review the output and ensure the highest quality and accuracy.

Before Document Understanding, even partially automated workflows required employees to step in and process documents manually. Document Understanding capabilities change that. Now businesses can teach robots to handle the entire process, while humans need only validate data or handle exceptions. Thanks to these UiPath Platform capabilities, documents are processed faster and at a lower cost. Customers enjoy quicker response times and employees have more freedom to focus on more challenging and enjoyable work.

Task mining: understanding how work gets done

UiPath Task Mining enables businesses to discover process data at speed and scale. To understand processes that employees perform on their desktops. Via the UiPath Platform, Task Mining capabilities accelerate business transformation by quickly discovering and evaluating opportunities for automation and process optimization from human-computer interactions.

Whether you know the process that needs to be captured or are looking to have visibility into what are currently unknown tasks, Task Mining has you covered. 

With Assisted Task Mining capabilities on the UiPath Platform, you start with curated recordings of tasks provided by users . Recorded actions are separated into semantically similar groups. Then, multiple executions of the same task are combined into a unified "task graph." 

If you want to explore an unknown business area, Unassisted Task Mining capabilities let you detect repetitive tasks from raw recordings of employee work on computer screens. No added input is needed from your people to map or understand these processes.

In this way, UiPath Task Mining enables businesses to collect process data at speed and scale. Which results in saving precious time and resources while gaining an accurate, objective picture of existing processes. Once you understand the tasks your people perform and how efficient they are, you have insights to automate or streamline processes. Knowing is half the battle, and Task Mining capabilities on the UiPath Platform help you get there faster.

Communications mining: understand and automate every message

NLP has recently been thrust into the spotlight. NLP is a branch of AI focused on helping machines understand human language and conversation. There have been stunning advances in the last few years and NLP underpins exciting tools like ChatGPT.

NLP is also key to communications mining, a new class of AI-enabled technology helping businesses understand and automate their service processes. Communications mining uses NLP and large language models to understand the intent, sentiment, and important data in communications across communications channels.

Communication is key to the success of any business. That's why we recently integrated Re:infer’s cutting-edge communications mining technology into the UiPath Business Automation Platform. Communications Mining capabilities provide UiPath customers with the power to mine their communications and extract valuable insights in real time.

UiPath Communications Mining offers powerful, fully customizable large language models to every business user. The tool extracts valuable insights, customer intents, reasons for contact, and emotions from almost any business message. For the first time, emails, tickets, and service-based processes can be understood and automated from end to end.

Developing these models has never been easier. UiPath Communications Mining offers a no-code training user interface (UI), automatic model validation, and model lifecycle management. These features help any business user train powerful AI models in hours, not weeks. No technical ability required.

UiPath automation technology is also easy to integrate into your existing infrastructure. The UiPath Platform offers prebuilt integrations for all major enterprise data sources, strong APIs, and connectors for workflow and automation systems.

The UiPath Business Automation Platform also provides built-in analytics and real-time monitoring capabilities. With these capabilities, you can mine your communications and build customizable dashboards to aggregate, query, and chart the process insights you've extracted. Real-time monitoring, configurable dashboards, alerts, and reports enable you to track specific themes and intents over time.

UiPath Communications Mining not only helps businesses understand the quality of service they provide, but continuously measures and improves service quality.

Supporting best-of-breed AI integrations

No platform will ever have a monopoly over the latest and greatest AI capabilities. That’s why we provide flexible connectors to help businesses integrate their favorite AI tools and build powerful end-to-end automations with the UiPath Platform.

UiPath Integration Service combines UI, API, and AI capabilities within the same design environment. Developers can quickly build automations using prebuilt connectors for tools including Google Vision, Microsoft Vision, Microsoft Sentiment, and Microsoft Translator. Or use Connector Builder to quickly create sharable, custom connectors.

UiPath and AWS have collaborated on an integration to seamlessly connect new ML models from AWS SageMaker into business processes. No need for complex scripting or manual effort.

We’ve also announced our new connectors for OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. The connectors help citizen developers build resilient, scalable automations with AI-generated language and advanced reasoning capabilities. For example, responses can be automatically generated for Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Teams, or Slack for service automations.

At UiPath AI Summit, we were delighted to reveal Project “Wingman” for UiPath Studio Web. Project “Wingman” is a powerful new feature enabling users to build automations simply from text-based descriptions.

The future of enterprise automation

Why do we automate? Automation makes things better, faster, easier. It accelerates human achievement by freeing us from ‘work’ so we can focus on the things that matter to us. It extracts and enters data, processes transactional requests, and performs mindless chores. All so you can focus on customers, collaboration, and creativity at work. Robots stop people from being robots.

AI takes the promise of automation to whole new levels. Robots that can understand language, process relations and intents, and see the world as humans do. AI-enabled robots can automate complex tasks we didn’t think possible a few years ago. 

But AI won’t replace us. For all its sophistication, AI needs humans at the helm to create and innovate. Humans review outputs, improve outcomes, ideate, and ensure AI models make the right decisions. AI provides the foundation—it’s up to us to achieve success. 

To see how advanced AI capabilities can be embedded to transform your business, view the on-demand session recordings from UiPath AI Summit.