Inspiring Innovation With API-Based Automation

“Genius is one-percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

That quote about innovation is attributed to Thomas A. Edison, well known as the inventor of the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera (at least in the United States).

Note that Edison puts inspiration first and perspiration—the plodding, often labor-intensive follow-on to inspiration—second.

Eliminating perspiration

But it’s the other way around if you reconsider Edison’s quote in terms of twenty-first century automation. These days we automate to eliminate perspiration—as well as the frustration experienced by workers confronted by repetitive and tedious tasks.

To reach this perspiration-free goal, we:

• Reexamine overly manual, and time-consuming processes

• Calculate return on investment (ROI) obtainable when human workers hand off process-task workflows to software robots

• Evaluate artificial intelligence (AI)-based, intelligent automation platforms, supporting user interface (UI) emulation, workflow design and orchestration, as well as document understanding

Obviously, there’s more to enterprise automation innovation than these three bullets.

Automation, or robotic process automation (RPA), continuously helps developers pioneer new use cases beyond the tried-and-true automation of well-practiced and standardized processes.

Certainly, new advancements in technology can be counted on to inspire the next automation opportunity.

Innovation through integration

Released just five months ago as part of the UiPath end-to-end automation platform, UiPath Integration Service is helping inspire new and improved automations, while eliminating automation connectivity bottlenecks.

Note the three industry-leading factors at play:

1. UiPath Integration Service brings together UI and API automation, allowing developers to leverage both capabilities within a single, integration design environment—including within the same automation or workflow.

2. A ready-for-use, catalog of popular, pre-built API connectors significantly simplifies integration and authentication for any automation process. Connectors for applications, such as Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Office 365, SAP®, ServiceNow, and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), come with native objects and standardized activities.

3. Server-side triggers empower robots to work automatically across dozens of applications based on events in connected systems. Server-side events include data updates, insertions or added data, and deletions. For example, a workflow could be kicked off by a new opportunity updated in Salesforce, a transaction being posted in SAP, or simply, the receipt of an email.

Integrating with connectors

Off-the-shelf connectors, available through the Integration Service catalog, lend timely cross-system support for new, automated workflows.

As the catalog includes all currently available connectors, perusing the catalog’s content for systems within your enterprise, you might discover the starting point to brainstorm new automations.

Connectors as catalyst

For example, by utilizing the following pre-built connectors—which provide their own set of native Activity Packs and triggers—we can conceptualize the following ‘contact-to-social media’ process:

1. Salesforce: any contact, with an updated sales probability between 20% and 50%, is sent in near real time to Campaign Monitor.

2. Campaign Monitor: a robot triggers the creation of two target segments based on the designated 20%-to-50% Salesforce contacts. One segment for emails, a second for social media.

3. Twitter: Twitter is triggered to transmit a tailored marketing message to contact the second segment.

In our previous blog, Expanding the Power of CRM through API Automation, we explored additional customer relationship management (CRM) automations based on UiPath pre-built connectors. Or, for more details about using UiPath API integration to help inspire additional, automated workflows, this webinar recording discusses building CRM automations, use cases, and demos: