Agentic automation: The path to an orchestrated enterprise

In recent years, the introduction of AI has increased the power and impact of enterprise automation, enabling us to strive for ever-greater efficiency and productivity. At the same time, the processes these automations are empowering have also grown in complexity. Investment has poured into siloed enterprise systems, with the average large company now using over 175 enterprise applications across their workflows. Data has become more siloed and processes more fragmented. Many decisions within a workflow aren't clear-cut, requiring people to step in—all of which adds to the operational burden. Finally, the complexity of these processes means they cannot cohesively be monitored, optimized, or fully automated.

A new era for automation—agentic automation—provides a new path forward. Combining agents, robots, AI, and people, agentic automation can automate even the longest, most complex processes end to end. Working effortlessly across disparate systems, it will deliver transformational outcomes across the enterprise, making businesses more autonomous and productive while enhancing the experiences of customers and employees. Agents are increasingly taking on the majority of work, while people continue and expand their roles as supervisors, decision makers, and leaders.

At our most recent UiPath FORWARD, our CEO Daniel Dines and Chief Product Officer Graham Sheldon introduced the UiPath vision for agentic automation. At the AI Summit New York, I had the great pleasure of diving deeper and sharing more details around our vision on how all the pieces of agentic automation fit together. Here’s a quick recap:

What does the agentic and robotic future look like?

Businesses have known and benefitted from robotic process automation (RPA) for years. Robots perform work tasks by interacting with screens, systems, and data like people do. They are rules-based, act predictably, and make deterministic decisions. This makes them highly reliable and efficient for routine tasks that don't need adaptability or decision making skills—like entering data, processing transactions, or triggering responses.

AI agents are a much newer, emerging technology. Agents are AI-model-based, enabling them to work independently of people and improve over time. There are many different types of agents, but they are generally goal-oriented and able to use context to make proactive and probabilistic decisions. This makes them complementary to robots and ideal for complex processes that require high adaptability. Imagine you need to book a flight for work: an agent could plan the entire trip, comparing flight and hotel prices to get you the best deal before booking everything for you. And it could adhere to company policies, like cost, location, approved airlines and hotels.

While flexible and powerful, agents can’t handle an entire process all by themselves. Agents need humans to monitor their performance, approve, and improve their work. But agents also need robots to complete many of the individual, routine tasks that make up long-running enterprise processes. Just like any employee, every agent has a toolbox of tools and capabilities they need to do their job. Alongside API connectors and intelligent document processing, robots are one of the handiest tools in the toolbox! Consider the travel booking example: to book the flight or hotel, an agent needs to ‘call’ on a robot to input the passenger's information, including name and payment details, to complete the process.

To automate long, complex, and dynamic enterprise processes, agents and robots need to work together. A useful (though simplified) analogy is the left and right parts of the brain working together. In the emerging autonomous enterprise, important and logical left-brain tasks, like data gathering, entry, and migration, will be done by robots. Creative and dynamic right-brain tasks—forecasting, comparison, innovation, and problem solving—will be performed by agents. This combination of capabilities makes agents and robots a power couple poised to automate the majority of all ‘work.'

But this raises a critical question. Where do humans fit into the agentic and robotic future?

The answer is that they remain firmly in control.

Humans will use agents and robots as tools to supercharge their productivity, creating new agentic workflows as needed. Human in the loop will be crucial for exception management, with employees stepping in to solve ‌problems that agents and robots can’t. Human judgment, compassion, and responsibility can’t be replicated. That’s why people are the leaders, supervisors, and ultimate decision makers of agentic automation.

Enterprise agents: controlled agency

Agents are core to agentic automation. But enterprises don’t just need autonomous agents who can do things—they need enterprise agents they can trust to do them safely, accurately, and reliably. Speaking at UiPath FORWARD, our Chief Technology Officer Raghu Malpani put it succinctly: "You don’t just want agents. You want agents you can trust."

However, there’s a technological challenge in achieving trusted agents. In every capability, there’s always a trade-off between reliability and autonomy. Compare very reliable but low-agency robots with high-agency but low-reliability agents. Traditionally, the more freedom you give a capability to act independently, the less predictable its outputs will be. In enterprise processes, unpredictability can be costly and risky.

Fortunately, there are ways to achieve both autonomy and reliability in agentic automation. We’re building first-class, enterprise agents combining high agency with the reliability we achieved long ago with our robots. We're bending the curve from autonomous to trusted enterprise agents. We do this by helping customers understand how their agents reason and make decisions, and by giving them the tools to monitor, analyze, and improve their performance.

Enterprises should prioritize solutions that let them easily experiment with different models and prompts to identify the ones that are most effective and trustworthy. Ensure these are grounded with the most current and relevant business context and data to deliver accurate and reliable business results. After deploying an agent, you also need the process intelligence capabilities to continuously monitor its performance and evaluate it against real-world datasets.

The combination of these tools and practices delivers ‘controlled agency’ in agentic automation. Just like AI, agents need guardrails that don’t limit their creativity or problem-solving powers, but which keep their outputs within acceptable boundaries for the enterprise. The result is agents who do their jobs autonomously and reliably, delivering business outcomes you can trust.

Agentic orchestration: bringing it all together

However, agentic automation is more than just trusted enterprise agents. It’s about transformative, end-to-end outcomes. That requires effective collaboration between all the components that comprise enterprise workflows and total visibility into how they’re working together. However, that isn’t always easy due to process complexity and limited visibility into those processes.

Agentic automation needs an orchestration layer to seamlessly orchestrate end-to-end processes across humans, systems, robots, and AI agents. This requires a gamut of capabilities like process management, process intelligence, automation, and agentic AI. Agents also need to be a key ingredient in the process management lifecycle, with tools to design, orchestrate, and monitor agentic workflows across systems.

Why is all this orchestration necessary? Consider vendor invoice processing, a common process that can be automated end to end with agentic automation. Dealing with a single invoice is a complex process that crosses numerous systems—from the mailbox to the enterprise resource planning system—and which demands action, reasoning, and decision making at several key stages.

Working together, robots, agents, and people can do it all, but only when properly orchestrated. Every action, handoff, and integration needs to be supervised and monitored through a larger orchestration layer. Only then can the process flow smoothly, successfully, and be improved.

The UiPath Platform™ has the unique ability to orchestrate agents, robots, humans, and APIs across end-to-end agentic workflows. We support full process instance management, complete process lifecycle management, and analytics. This empowers our customers to automate, model, and monitor complex business processes from start to finish. We do all of this within a single platform that’s built to be system-agnostic and cross-compatible. That’s what makes UiPath a leader in agentic automation and orchestration.

Managing the hype and making it a reality

New technology is always exciting. Technology leaders are rushing to release the next game-changing assistant or agent, while analysts speculate on the total size of the agentic market. But it’s one thing to be first and another thing to be ready to lead on agentic automation.  

Businesses don’t need standalone autonomous agents; they need enterprise agents they can trust to transform their processes. Without robots, humans, controlled agency, and best-in-class orchestration, agents become just another tool to add to the pile. Having powerful AI models without automation is like having a brain without a body. Similarly, agents are nothing without the right tools.

For more on UiPath Agents and our vision for agentic automation, check out our on-demand sessions from UiPath FORWARD.