UiPath, the market leader in software bots for process automation, is shifting its focus to AI agents that can make dynamic decisions. This is a remarkable (but very understandable) transition from robotic AI handling repetitive tasks to agentic AI taking on more complex and adaptive tasks.
The company made this announcement at its own FORWARD conference in Las Vegas and immediately introduced two products to flesh out this change in direction: Autopilot and Agent Builder. Autopilot, now available for free, is an AI tool that allows employees to automate workflows through a conversational interface (i.e., in a ChatGPT-like fashion). It works on both Windows and Mac.
Build your own agents
Autopilot allows you to build the agent you need without technical skills. This could include automating document analysis or data entry, as well as matching responses to more complicated questions with proprietary data. An additional advantage is that UiPath’s existing security and management functions, the so-called UiPath AI Trust Layer, are also applicable here and made suitable for managing such agents.
“Agents allow anyone to handle more complex tasks and brand-new scenarios, which provides tremendous value to our customers”, said Graham Sheldon, Chief Product Officer at UiPath. “Providing customers with the ability to build their own specialized agents in a simple, low-code integrated development environment or a pre-built template makes it easy for them to automate new use cases, avoid costs, and stay ahead of competitors.”
Customers will have to wait a little longer to get started with the other addition to the portfolio, the Agent Builder. It goes into preview next December. With this tool, developers can create AI agents that collaborate with simpler (software) robots as well as human employees in shared workflows.
Humans, robots and agents in one workflow
The robotic AI is then assigned more repetitive tasks, for example, while the agentic AI suggests optimization steps and responds to dynamic situations. This tool is part of UiPath’s Studio suite and supports both custom and pre-configured agents, enabling developers to respond quickly to diverse automation needs.
These innovations in UiPath’s offerings show that the company’s direction is changing from purely rules-based automation to more flexible and versatile systems, where human workers collaborate with dynamic agents in a wide variety of use cases. Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath, calls this shift ‘the natural evolution of robotic process automation (RPA).’
Collaboration with LLM builders
During FORWARD, UiPath also announced that it is partnering with Inflection AI, maker of the Pi-LLM, to integrate the UiPath Platform with the Inflection for Enterprise software toolset. By partnering with Intel, Inflection aims to make UiPath’s tools available as an option for Intel’s Tiber AI Cloud service, using Intel’s new Gaudi 3 processors.
UiPath is also integrating Anthropic’s LLM Claude 3.5 Sonnet with its own product suite. This is intended to provide new AI features for Autopilot, Clipboard AI (a standalone application that helps with data entry and acts as an intelligent copy-paste assistant) and a new solution for summarizing medical records.
Read more: UiPath works closely with Inflection AI and integrates Claude