The top 5 AI announcements from UiPath FORWARD VI

Picking the top five announcements from FORWARD VI is kind of like selecting the top five views from Las Vegas’ new spectacular venue, the Sphere. Just as every view in the Sphere’s immersive 360-degree display is impressive, at FORWARD VI, the world’s largest gathering of automation and AI professionals, every announcement is noteworthy and exceptional.

Let’s explore some of the top AI announcements from FORWARD VI.

1. UiPath Autopilot

First up, we introduced UiPath Autopilot™, a new set of AI-powered experiences across the platform that helps all users be more productive. Autopilot helps you get more out of the products you use every day:

• Autopilot for Assistant is an AI companion that helps you tackle your daily task list. It securely blends the best of Generative AI and Specialized AI to work with a wide variety of systems and documents. Autopilot makes it easy to run existing automations and can even use AI to create new ones on the fly when needed.

• Autopilot for Studio enhances the productivity of both professional and new developers, empowering them to use natural language in their work. 'Text to workflow' transforms descriptions easily into automation workflows, reducing complexity, particularly for non-technical users. 'Text to expressions' generates expressions using natural language descriptions, allowing developers to focus on the problem at hand rather than syntax. 'Automated code generation' directly transforms descriptions into code-based automations. The development of workflows, generation of expressions, and automation of code using everyday language, developers will get more done every day.

• Autopilot for Apps empowers developers with AI capabilities, enabling creation of app interfaces and expressions using everyday language, documents, or images. Developers can fluently express their design intentions textually or visually, leading to diverse and user-friendly interface designs. Furthermore, the opportunity to generate expressions across all apps ensures a unified and accelerated development process.

• Autopilot for Test Suite accelerates every phase of the testing lifecycle. Generate tests from requirements, generate code from comments and surface actionable insights from execution results.

• Autopilot for Process Mining enables business analysts to use easily filter, summarize, and create dashboards for their automation opportunities.

• Autopilot for Communications Mining gets your analytics and reporting questions answered at speed. Express queries in natural language and the correct filters are applied.

Read more about UiPath Autopilot.

2. UiPath AI Trust Layer

As we build additional Generative AI (Gen AI) functionality into the UiPath Platform, to enhance and create these new experiences (including UiPath Autopilot™), it’s essential that we also address the need for additional governance. As a leading AI-powered automation platform, we focus on delivering enterprise-grade solutions with the safe and responsible use of AI. With that, at FORWARD VI we announced the UiPath AI Trust Layer, a management framework designed to ensure data security and responsible use of large language models (LLMs) across the UiPath Platform.

Built on the pillars of trust, transparency, and control, the AI Trust Layer will ensure that each organization has the means to set their own policies around data security, access control, and the ability to track and understand what interactions are taking place with third-party LLMs.

Read more about UiPath AI Trust Layer.

3. UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining

We also shared exciting announcements on intelligent document processing (IDP). We introduced the next-generation IDP experience powered by active learning and Generative AI. Specialized AI lays at the core of our IDP offering, allowing you to build a model—or adapt an out-of-the-box model offered by UiPath—to achieve higher accuracy for your specific business processes and requirements. Reducing model training time is key to bringing faster time to value and ROI with AI. Internal benchmarking shows our next-gen IDP experience accelerates model training time by up to 80%—from a week to a day for complex scenarios, or down to minutes for simpler forms.

Active learning is an innovative AI approach that enables anyone to train Specialized AI models for specific domains and document types. No ML or coding skills required; AI will guide you through the process of training—from automatic annotation (that is usually the most time-consuming) to expert-level recommendations on how to improve your model accuracy with the most informative datasets. Ongoing collaboration of humans and AI, coupled with built-in capabilities for instant model evaluation, can help you make sure your Specialized AI model is trained for your own business needs. This is how the next-gen UiPath Document Understanding experience works:

• Build your AI models: get your documents automatically classified and annotated, then follow the guided recommendations to achieve the highest model accuracy with active learning.

• Measure your model’s performance and get further guidance on how to improve it with the most efficient model training.

• Deploy and manage your Document Understanding projects with ease. You can easily make your AI models available for automations in UiPath Studio, Studio Web, or via APIs.

• Monitor the performance of your automations and easily drill down into detailed document-level audits.

Register now for the upcoming private preview in UiPath Insider Portal.

We’re also thrilled about the IDP Generative AI capabilities announced at UiPath TOGETHER earlier this year, launching in general availability and public preview in the 2023.10 release:

• Generative annotation (pre-labeling)—automatically annotate document samples and message clusters to reduce model training time.

• Generative classification—classify documents faster with Gen AI; you can just define the document types with no need to write rules or train new ML models.

• Generative extraction—leverage the ability of Gen AI to answer questions and summarize content to extract complex unstructured data from documents and messages.

4. UiPath Generative AI connectors

A growing collection of prebuilt Gen AI connectors are enabling expanded use cases across current and new UiPath automations.

For example, the officially released Open AI, and Microsoft Azure Open AI connectors leverage GPT 3.0 and 3.5 models to support text correction, summarization, chatbot, language translation, and Q&A within automations. With the addition of GPT 4.0, image recognition is also an option, allowing developers to combine text and images for a use case such as extracting text from images to include in reports, or adding subtitles to a presentation.

UiPath has officially released support for Google Vertex AI and its versatile text generation capabilities provided by PaLM2 models. PaLM2 is an alternative to GPT for text, as well as having been trained on more than 100 languages. It also addresses reasoning and includes wide-ranging datasets based on scientific papers and web pages that contain mathematical expressions.

Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, and Anthropic connectors are available in public preview. Powerful and popular LLMs including Falcon-40B, Llama2, Titan, Claude, Claude2, Claude Instant, and Jurassic, are now available to help unlock a set of new exciting Gen AI use cases.

5. Two new ways to learn AI

We’re thrilled to announce a new UiPath Professional certification. The Specialized AI Professional certification demonstrates a strong understanding and extensive hands-on experience with UiPath Document Understanding, Communications Mining, and AI Center. It covers the full lifecycle of these solutions including setup, model training and management, taxonomy design, and use in production automations.

Learning the ins and outs of these tools is particularly relevant for business analysts, automation developers, and solution architects looking to augment how quickly they can discover and action automation opportunities.

Read more about the certification.

Since launching UiPath Academy nearly a decade ago, we have committed to delivering lifelong learning resources for everyone. Shortly after, UiPath Academic Alliance launched, providing free curricula to campuses around the world. Millions of students and professionals around the world have learned to automate from UiPath. We remain committed to offering the curricula your companies, campuses, and communities need for AI and automation.

Watch the keynotes

We sincerely appreciate the partnership of all the customers, partners, and UiPath employees that made FORWARD VI such a success.

Are you a completionist who wants to see the full keynotes? No worries, you can check out the replays. Watch the full keynotes.