Accelerating the Development and Use of Automation

Organizations across the globe are embracing automation to increase productivity, ensure compliance, and provide better customer and employee experiences. To help you unlock full automation potential, we’ve been hard at work delivering new features that help you accelerate your automation program on all fronts—from development to consumption.

The new UiPath 2021.10 release includes a variety of enhancements focused on making it easier for developers to build, for end users to find and use simple automations, and for partners to grow revenue streams while serving their clients better. Let’s take a closer look.

Drive higher automation impact with enhanced experience for business users

A lot of manual work happens in the day-to-day life of your employees, making them less productive and less engaged. In fact, most employees feel like they’re doing the same work over and over again—and can’t efficiently help their customers.

Together with Bain & Company, we recently ran a survey of over 500 workers and found that 86% of those surveyed say they are willing to use automation if given the chance. People are comfortable with automation and are willing to delegate their mundane tasks to digital assistant to get more time for higher-value work.

To help you provide employees with easy access to automation tools and maximize automation adoption, we’re excited to introduce you to the new 2021.10 improvements that enable business users to:

• Submit automation ideas, as well as kickstart process documentation directly from the Assistant launchpad (powered by the new integration between UiPath Assistant, UiPath Automation Hub, and UiPath Task Capture).

• Easily discover and consume ready-to-go automations from UiPath Marketplace directly from Assistant. Now, employees can instantly benefit from high-quality, secure automations available right in their Assistant. Automation leaders can easily manage the whole program and get quick automation ROI with minimal development efforts.​

Moreover, with a goal of ensuring seamless collaboration between humans and robots, Action Center brings new features:

• Bulk handling of actions: business users can provide the same inputs to multiple actions such as completing similar tasks, closing all actions that are not relevant anymore, and updating several fields in multiple forms.

• Fine-grained options to resume a workflow: previously, long running workflows could only be resumed in robots within a specific folder. This required users to dedicate several robots to a workflow. With the 2021.10 release, users now have the option to resume a workflow on a specific robot and in a specific user context. This new feature frees other robots to execute other processes.

• Centralized Action Center portal to manage actions: users can manage actions and action catalogs through admin settings. To avoid business disruption, users who want to visit the old Actions user interface (UI) within Orchestrator will be automatically routed to a corresponding action on the Action Center portal.

• Attended-to-unattended handoff with actions: an attended automation suspended pending user inputs can be now resumed in an unattended robot once a business user completes an action.

Accelerate automation development with new updates for developers

In addition to providing easy access to Marketplace content for business users, RPA developers now access UiPath Marketplace from Studio and StudioX, and get the templates and automation sequences to help expedite their time to deployment. Hundreds of automations, pre-vetted and checked by our Marketplace team, are now at developers’ disposal.

And to make development even easier, our new release of Object Repository allows RPA developers to capture all elements of an interface in one go, without needing to add them individually to a library. This allows developers to save time capturing a regular interface, with dozens of buttons, controls, and fields. Once captured and stored in the repositories, developers can now use the elements in both Studio and StudioX.

As teams add more and more input into Automation Hub and fill in more details there, we have added a one-click setup of a Studio project, starting from Automation Hub. From Automation Hub you can get all the relevant details such as URL, Idea title and description, and move them into Studio, enabling continuity of a project throughout the automation cycle.

Making life easier for citizen developers

We know that business users have a different mindset than RPA developers, so our goal for this release was to improve ease of use for citizen developers as much as possible. First, the new Object Repository release means that StudioX users can take advantage of all the repositories created by their RPA developers, and shared within the company. This means they no longer need to identify the UI elements themselves, but get to reuse something already saved. With the new connection that allows users to find automation ideas in Microsoft Teams, this creates a lot more opportunities for the citizen developer to automate.

And with the power of artificial intelligence (AI), we can now help the StudioX user find the next best step in their automation by suggesting which action should come next.

This 2021.10 release also includes improved integrations with Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint online cloud locations. Citizen developers can now browse sites and files, upload and download files, delete/copy/move files, and share files. We have also updated the activities panel, giving it a tree-based look that supports a higher volume of activities. A better experience with cross-platform robots.

A better experience with cross-platform robots

As we move towards a more platform inclusive world, it now becomes possible to run robots on multiple platforms. UiPath robots have always supported automation in Windows environments. With this release, we’ve added cross-platform support with Linux-based robots, which can run API automations that execute quickly, using a low level of resources.

UiPath Apps expressions, file controls, and Data Service Integration

RPA developers are using UiPath Apps to build user-friendly interfaces for their automations. In 2021.10, developers can:

• Use Expressions to add calculations and input validation to apps without having to build a separate automation. This dramatically improves app performance for end users.

• Leverage File Control to upload a file into Orchestrator data storage (storage bucket) and use it in the automation process. They can also download files from Orchestrator data storage, and even bind the files to an image control.

• Benefit from Data Service support to store and update their automation-related data from Apps in UiPath Data Service. Developers can centralize their automation data and ensure that critical business information is not left on user or robot machines, file shares, or other storage services.

Artificial intelligence plays a big part in this UiPath release

Let’s talk first about Forms AI, a preview release that brings the power of AI to processing forms and documents with similar formats. With a point-and-click experience that does not require coding or machine learning (ML) skills, Forms AI makes it easy for even citizen developers and business users to train low-touch ML models. The models get continuously retrained after each validated example—so you no longer need to spend resources on manual data labeling and model training. With Forms AI, it takes just minutes to build a working solution. The diagram below shows, step by step, how AI Forms works:

Next up are AI solution templates, which bring together ready-to-use components required to get custom AI-enhanced automations up and running quickly. Components include ML models, sample dataset, RPA workflows, standard analytics, and human in the loop technology.

For example, the Email AI solution template provides everything needed to build custom AI-enhanced solutions for smart email processing to detect intent in emails, identify urgent and high-value emails, extract important information, and show the impact of AI-enhanced automations on a dashboard. Watch the demo video to see how Email AI works:

Read more about Forms AI and Email AI.

Finally, let's talk about the AI Center deployment and access control enhancement. UiPath AI Center provides three additional deployment options to customer and partners—in UiPath Automation Suite, on your existing clusters, and on multi-node bundled Kubernetes.

Previously, AI Center was available in UiPath Automation Cloud™, on-premises, and in air-gapped environments. In this release, AI Center also brings project-level access control. This new feature allows users to better protect sensitive business data by setting up access control based on projects. With this feature, you can limit project access to users in one particular region or limit ML model access to a limited group of users. Read the product documentation about this new AI Center access control feature.

Benefit from enhanced process discovery capabilities

Earlier this year, we made it easier than ever for our Automation Cloud customers to identify repetitive tasks to add to their automation pipeline with the launch of UiPath Task Mining. Task Mining automatically identifies and aggregates employee workflows. Then, with the help of AI, UiPath Task Mining enables customers to easily determine which of their processes is an ideal automation candidate.

Today, we are excited to bring Task Mining to our on-premises customers, in addition to several enterprise-grade enhancements to Cloud Task Mining:

• Integrations - Easily refine and export the results of your projects with Task Capture and Automation Hub integrations

• PII Data Masking - Improved data privacy during studies with a built-in, pre-configured personal identifiable information (PII) data masking capability

• URL allow/deny - Improved study experience with the ability to allow and deny specific URLs for inclusion in the study

UiPath Process Mining has also received significant improvements. We know different organizations execute processes in different ways and have different key performance indicators (KPIs) and business goals. As such, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ when it comes to building Process Mining analyses. But TemplateOne gives organizations a head start in building custom analyses. Its simple developer experience makes it straightforward and fast to create tailor-made Process Mining dashboards and KPIs.

The 2021.10 release also includes significant experience improvements to UiPath Task Capture:

• Import from Microsoft Visio - Easily open MS Visio files in Task Capture instead of creating the diagram from scratch.

• Updated diagram editor - Customize your process diagram, provide more details about the elements, and easily manipulate the process diagram.

• Detect and merge same-screen actions - Task Capture can now automatically identify same-screen actions, lets users review them, and merge automatically, manually, or keep as is.

• Combine multiple documents - Copy and paste diagram elements and actions from one UiPath Task Capture project into another. Open the files in different instances and compare, edit, or combine the elements using common hotkeys.

Assess automations accurately and prioritize easier

To ensure an automation program is successful, center of excellence (CoE) leads have to accurately access and prioritize automation ideas. With the 2021.10 release, Automation Hub lets you customize the detailed assessment based on the criteria that matter most to your business. Leverage the customization page to build on top of an existing assessment or set your own from scratch. Determine your KPIs and questions to define them—remove default questions, add new ones, reorder, give more power to one item over the other, etc.

Prioritization is easier and has greater impact, with no extra calculations needed. As a result, you can confidently report to your management based on the transparent and relevant evaluations.

Better yet, Automation Hub can now be deployed on-premises, as part of UiPath Automation Suite. Discover and manage automation opportunities in one place—with flexible deployment options. Get more details about what features are included for Automation Hub on-premises in this release.

Making the ecosystem better for UiPath partners

We know the value that a UiPath partner can bring to an implementation, so we do our best to cover partner needs within each one of our releases as well. Starting with this release, we introduce monetization capabilities on UiPath Marketplace, making it easier for partners to share their RPA content with more than 100,000 Marketplace users, including UiPath enterprise customers, RPA developers, and automation experts. Now, partners can unlock new revenue opportunities by monetizing content they publish on the Marketplace, bringing enterprise-level automation components to serve customer needs.

We hope that each and everyone of our customers, partners, and users find something to fit their needs in this fall release. Join us for the 2021.10 virtual release event on November 18, 2021, to see the feature enhancements in action.

And join our Insider program to get early access to new features and updates, and share your feedback on our latest innovations.