Automation in 2020: Revisiting Your Favorite Blog Posts of the Year

Every year, we like to look back and review the articles that you, our readers, loved most. Looking at your favorite 2020 blog posts, two big themes emerged: COVID-19 and artificial intelligence (AI).

COVID-19 dominated the headlines all year, and while pandemic news may have felt overwhelming at times, it resulted in some inspiring applications of automation to help global companies respond to the crisis.

2020 was also a time when we all considered a new future of work. Many of your most popular posts involved AI, a technology that is getting more practical and widespread by the day. 

Join me for a review of your favorite posts from 2020. If you missed any, now’s the best chance to get caught up. And if you’re looking for a big-picture view of automation in 2020, this is the place to start.

This introduction to UiPath Document Understanding was the most-viewed 2020 blog post. Every company has documents, so every company has a reason to process documents faster. In this post, we introduce the world to UiPath Document Understanding, which combines robotic process automation (RPA) and AI to automatically process documents.

Related reading:

• Increase Operational Efficiency and Mitigate Risks with Document Understanding

• Overcoming the Productivity Paradox With RPA

This article highlights companies using software robots to prioritize the health of their employees. The Health Screening robot took center stage as it helped healthcare workers capture data and maintain social distancing (and it’s still available for free in UiPath Marketplace!).

Related reading:

• New Study: Impact of COVID-19 on the Future of Work and Automation

• How Health-Tracking Robots Are Being Used in the Battle Against COVID-19

At our DevCon event and the Reboot Work Festival, we introduced UiPath Apps, a low-code app builder that developers can use to create experiences powered by automation. In this post, readers learn about App Studio, which lets users build beautiful, professional apps through a browser-based, drag-and-drop interface. You also learn about how automation powers UiPath Apps.

Related reading:

• Announcing General Availability of UiPath Apps

• Understanding Citizen Developers: Your Secret Weapon in Scaling Automation

Companies looking to take up automation often have questions about which automation technologies are right for them. This post describes the differences between RPA automation and API automation and explores use cases for each. Importantly, it also shows how, despite the differences, the best companies will use both technologies where appropriate. As our CEO Daniel Dines said during the Reboot Work Festival, “The power comes in the combination. It’s using the right tool for the right job.”

Related reading:

• RPA and the ROI Conundrum

• Why RPA is an Ideal Technology to Integrate Legacy Systems

The two biggest product releases across the UiPath Platform last year were the 2020 Full-Term Support (FTS) and the 2020 Long-Term Support (LTS) later in the year. There were so many updates to speak to that we created an entire release series. This article walks you through everything in the 2020 LTS (or 20.10 for short) release series (from webinars to blog posts and demos).

Related reading:

• The 4 Pillars of a Fully Automated Enterprise

• Advancing the Automation Platform

AI has been top of mind for years, and 2020 was no different. What was different, however, was the release of UiPath AI Fabric in the cloud: a fully managed software as a service (SaaS) platform for UiPath AI Fabric. In this article, we explain why RPA needs AI, why AI needs RPA, and how UiPath AI Fabric in the cloud brings both together in a highly available, highly scalable service.

Editor's note: As the automation market continues to evolve, the UiPath Platform also updates to best serve the automation needs of our customers. As such, some of the product names in this article have evolved since the article was originally published. For up-to-date information, please visit our AI Center page.

Related reading:

• Heritage Bank: Driving Automation With RPA and AI

• Large Health Insurance Company Uses UiPath AI Fabric to Streamline Clinical Outcomes

During 2020, we faced the prospect of a world forever changed by COVID-19. In this article, you see how automation can play a role in building a new future. Find out why hospitals, governments, and healthcare providers are turning to automation and explore how they’ve transformed their businesses to meet this new reality.

Related reading:

• New Normal, New Pressures: Automation's Five Areas of Impact

• RPA and COVID-19: How Software Robots Are Helping Companies Put Employee Health First

Businesses everywhere are facing the challenge of maintaining and improving operational efficiency. As companies grow in size and across regions, this challenge only gets harder. This post dives into process mining, a technique for gathering and analyzing data across systems.

Related reading:

• Eight Reasons to Use Process Mining in Your Organization

• How Enterprises Are Improving Operational Efficiency with Process Mining

Companies that implement RPA often struggle to get all the benefits they expect of an automation program. Here, this post introduces a model that offers organizations a holistic view of all the automation program decisions their teams need to make. This article, part one in a three-part series, explains the four stages that many organizations go through as they pursue automation at scale.

Related reading:

• Building the Team - Automation Operating Model (Part 2)

• Reaching Full Automation Potential - Automation Operating Model (Part 3)

AI is a big, sometimes nebulous cluster of technologies that nevertheless promises immense benefits to companies that can harness it. UiPath focuses on practical AI—technologies that can deliver tangible results in realistic scenarios. One of the barriers companies face is when they lack employees with extensive data science backgrounds. This article covers UiPath Starter Models, one answer to this problem.

Related reading:

• Easily Retrain AI Starter Models for More Accurate Results

• Better Business Outcomes by Operationalizing Artificial Intelligence at Scale

Businesses are often overloaded with documents. There’s immense value in the information contained in these documents, but that value is often trapped, unable to be integrated into an organization’s wider digital system. This article explores the document understanding ecosystem, a whole world of tools and technologies purpose-built to address this problem.

Related reading:

• How to Use AI to Optimize Document Understanding

Scaling RPA programs can be difficult. If departments work in silos, robots can start to break as teams bring automations together. Enter UiPath Test Suite. This article walks you through how Test Suite helps companies proactively test automations as they scale them across an enterprise.

Related reading:

• Scale Your Automation Program with This 7-Pillar Framework

• Robotics for Test Automation: The UiPath Test Suite Backstory

This post introduces UiPath Studio Pro—a new addition to the UiPath Studio family of products. One of our goals this year was to broaden the spectrum of developers who can take advantage of UiPath tools, and Studio Pro fulfills that goal. Studio Pro houses high-end developer capabilities, including testing capabilities and Mobile Automation.

Related reading:

• Building the Future, One Robot at a Time

One of 2020’s major trends was the rise of chatbots. More and more customers want self-service options when interacting with companies, but up until now, most chatbots have focused on fulfilling simple requests. This post explains how our partnership with Druid, a company that offers a no-code chatbot platform, can help you improve customer satisfaction and engagement.

Related reading:

• Taking Customers’ Successes to New Heights: Introducing New UiPath Customer Success Program

• UiPath for Contact Center Automation

One of the most popular posts of the year took us back to basics: what is AI and what is RPA? It’s a question worth asking, even if you think you know the answer. This post explains the differences between the two technologies, uncovers the hype that underlies both, and explores use cases for each.

Related reading:

• AI-Enhanced Automations – Combining Transformative Capabilities

• Manage and Scale AI with Automation to Achieve Faster ROI

Unleashing information from documents was a big theme for you in 2020. This post reviews some of the most common document types, takes a look at data extraction methods, examines some of the challenges companies have when implementing these methods, and reviews the benefits companies can earn if they surmount these challenges.

Related reading:

• Using AI to Automate Invoices and Receipt Processing

In 2020, Chief Evangelist Guy Kirkwood revisited his annual tradition of examining his predictions from last year and making more predictions for next year. In this post, Kirkwood predicts an ambitious range of events, including RPA becoming the new enterprise resource planning (ERP) for many organizations and the rise of at-home software robots.

Related reading:

• 7 Predictions for RPA and AI in 2020

Diego Lomanto, Vice President of Product Marketing at UiPath, is a lucky guy. One of the perks of working at a customer-centric company is that he gets to hear firsthand how our customers use automation and to sit in on important discussions led by innovative automation leaders at large companies. Across these feedback channels, he noticed a trend: automation leaders wanted to scale past the obvious RPA use cases. However, they needed a systemic way to discover new use cases.

Enter: the automation flywheel, which describes how the consumption of automation leads to new ideas for automation. In this post, Lomanto explains how the automation flywheel enables companies to find new use cases, deploy more robots, and democratize their automation capabilities.

Related reading:

• The Importance of Looking Beyond Low Hanging Fruit to Successfully Scale RPA

• Key Report Findings Indicate It’s Time to Automate Now for Companies to Survive and Thrive

In February of 2020, we debuted Agent Desktop, a replacement for Robot Tray. Agent Desktop provides a better experience for users deploying attended robots. This post explains some of the features behind Agent Desktop and establishes a vision for “one-stop” attended automation.

Related reading:

• Finding Your RPA Use Cases: 3 Ways Unattended Robots Can Do It Better (Part 1)

• Finding Your RPA Use Cases: 3 Ways Attended Robots Can Help You Do More (Part 2)

As global markets get more competitive, C-suite leaders look to add advantages to their companies. Companies have spent billions, and will soon spend trillions, on digital transformations that promise to deliver that edge. This post introduces RPA to the C-suite and explains how this technology can cut down operating costs, increase task efficiency, and reduce compliance errors. Want to get your C-suite excited about automation? Share this article with them.

Related reading:

• How to Advocate for Automation to Your CFO (Part One)

• IT Central Station: RPA and the Fulfillment of the CIO’s Mandate

In February, users explored our UIAutomation.Next initiative. The initiative presents a shift toward giving users the ability to directly interact with how software robots “see” the interface. In March, which this post covers, the initiative evolved to include many improvements, including a validation capability and a better UX.

Related reading:

• UiPath 2020.2 Monthly Update

• Introducing UiPath JavaScript SDK for Robot

In May, UiPath Automation Cloud launched, enabling users to get the benefits of automation from the cloud instead of having to set up costly infrastructure. This post introduces Automation Cloud for community and Automation Cloud for enterprise and shares some of the excitement from customers ready to dive in.

Related reading:

• UiPath Automation Cloud: Security, Privacy, and Compliance

Healthcare organizations have long been some of the most innovative users of automation. COVID-19 put new pressures on these organizations, but with RPA, they were able to increase capacity to meet unprecedented demand. This post looks at five health organizations using software robots to decrease wait times and give essential workers more time to spend with people.

Related reading:

• 6 Ways Automation Can Help with COVID Vaccination Rollouts

• 5 Ways RPA and AI Can Position Businesses For Success Now and After COVID-19

Rounding out your favorites from 2020 is a popular post about topics that came up again and again this year: OCR, AI, and data analysis. Eighty to ninety percent of all data is unstructured, and that lack of structure leaves a lot of value unused. Once you combine OCR with AI and RPA, however, you can analyze more data—much, much more data—than was ever possible before.

Related reading:

• Intelligent OCR, RPA's Sidekick in the Fight with Unstructured Data

• Top 10 Examples of Successful Data Analysis

Rounding out your favorite posts of the year is an article about how technology helps us overcome limitations. The problem today? Time. When tedious tasks inundate people’s days, there just isn’t enough time to do meaningful work. This post explains how RPA is revolutionizing the workplace and how, soon, every employee will have a software robot working alongside them.

Related reading:

• A Robot for Every Person - Benefit from RPA at Enterprise-Wide Scale

• Unlock Automation Impact at Scale with ‘a Robot for Every Person’

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