Build better, faster, stronger automations with UiPath Autopilot™ and generative AI

Businesses’ honeymoon with generative AI (GenAI) is over. The required infrastructure and models are all readily available, courtesy of the big cloud platform and service providers. The challenge now lies in bringing everything together. How can businesses orchestrate their many tools, integrations, and applications to finally deliver the promised value of GenAI? 

In a previous blog, Graham Sheldon, our Chief Product Officer, shared the UiPath formula for GenAI success. Making an impact hinges on feeding your models the right context, using best-in-class models, and giving them the power to take action through automation.

Graham recently joined UiPath on Tour London, where he updated our customers and partners on how the UiPath Business Automation Platform™ achieves this. Our new AI-powered features will enable enterprises to develop, automate, test, and improve their processes faster than ever. They’re a powerful demonstration of how AI can be rapidly scaled to drive real value right now. 

Here’s a detailed overview of our new feature releases:

AI context meets automated action: UiPath Autopilot™

Last October at FORWARD, we shared how we’re infusing GenAI into the UiPath Platform to redefine the enterprise automation category. We introduced UiPath Autopilot™, a new set of cross-platform experiences blending specialized AI and GenAI that make every user, from interns to executives, more productive.

At UiPath On Tour London, Graham announced the first Autopilot experiences for automation developers and testers are now generally available. For today’s digital enterprise, rapid development and testing speeds are a top priority. Onstage, Graham demonstrated how Autopilot transforms the critical workflows of developers and testers; how it reduces time to value against the market, helping our customers reach the finish line first and improve even faster.

UiPath Autopilot for developers uses the power of GenAI and natural language processing (NLP) in UiPath Studio to create workflows, generate expressions, and help build automations. With an over 70% acceptance rate, Autopilot for developers text to workflow is making things easier for beginning developers, and speeding up scaffolding for experienced developers. It delivers:

• Text to workflow: Simply describe an automation idea in natural language, and Autopilot will create the initial workflow for you.

• Text to expressions: With Autopilot, developers no longer need to remember the exact syntax and structure of expressions. Just describe what you need in natural language and allow AI to generate the correct expression.

• Text to code: Generate code from natural language descriptions to shorten time to deployment for automation projects.

• PDF form, text, or image to UiPath Apps: In UiPath Apps, Autopilot enables developers to quickly create a brand-new app—either from a PDF file or from an image of a paper form.

UiPath Autopilot for testers accelerates every aspect of software testing. It leverages GenAI to refine and improve requirements, generates step-by-step tests from those requirements, and uses those tests to create coded automations. It provides:

• Quality checks: Autopilot analyzes and evaluates your requirements to ensure they are clear, consistent, and complete.

• Test design: From those requirements and supporting docs, Autopilot generates manual tests with step-by-step instructions.

• Test automation: Autopilot converts any text, such as manual tests, into automated tests in UiPath Studio with little to no effort.

• Test insights: Autopilot provides real-time, actionable insights into your test case portfolio to offer continuous improvement.

In addition, we were pleased to announce the UiPath plugin and integration with Copilot for Microsoft 365 has entered general availability. The integration enables joint customers to automate their end-to-end business processes with coworkers directly within Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. Customers will have access to a prebuilt automation library to run automations that complete common, repetitive tasks, along with specialized automations for function- or industry-specific tasks. Users can also discover and run existing automations their company has developed.

AI built for your documents

UiPath remains committed to building best-in-class AI models for core business tasks. To this effect, we’ve released new AI enhancements for our intelligent document processing (IDP) offerings. At On Tour London, Graham shared multiple new improvements we’ve rolled out to accelerate all types of document processing.

UiPath DocPath and CommPath are specialized large language models (LLMs) enabling out-of-the-box processing of any document or message, with increased accuracy, speed, and scale. Both LLMs are now in general availability.

DocPath enables data extraction from documents out-of-the-box in UiPath Document Understanding™, including purchase orders, bank statements, remittance advices, utility bills, and many more documents. Soon you'll also be able to leverage DocPath for your own custom document types. Join UiPath Insider Program for the upcoming private preview announcement.

CommPath is designed to process diverse communication types, from emails to system notes. Through its generative extraction feature, CommPath can process communications of varying complexity, including those with multiple requests and intentions within a single message.

Other exciting new capabilities to our IDP offering include:

• Active learning: reduced training effort by 80% thanks to the introduction of active learning techniques. Now, anyone (and we mean anyone) can easily train their own models with active guidance from AI. No machine learning or coding skills are required.

• Generative validation: now you can use GenAI to validate Document Understanding model outputs. Generative validation offers a ‘second opinion’ on the data extracted from your documents, reducing the workload of human annotators. This reduces the time spent on human validation, decreases average handling time, and boosts automation rates by up to 200%.

We’re also about to launch our revamped Validation Station, an advanced but easy-to-use tool for optimized data reviews in automations that employ UiPath Communications Mining™ and Document Understanding. The validation rules will also be customizable within each workflow to meet the exact business needs and requirements of the use case.

AI-powered building blocks

UiPath is also using AI to simplify and improve higher-level automation tasks. Onstage, we revealed a collection of new AI-powered activities for the UiPath Studio product family.

Our GenAI activities are a curated collection of activities that simplify common GenAI use cases for automation developers, including:

• Content Generation: generates a chat response for the provided request using chat completion models.

• PII Filtering: scans the input text, identifies any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Protected Health Information (PHI), and replaces such data with a redaction marker.

• Summarize Text: summarizes text using an LLM.

• Translate: detects and reports the language of any given text.

• Object Detection: identifies and locates objects within images for tasks like automated inspections or data collection.

• Image Classification: categorizes images into predefined classes to support processes like sorting products or analyzing documents.

• Categorize: organizes data into categories for improved analysis and decision making in workflows.

• Named Entity Recognition: extracts specific entities (like names, places, and dates) from text, aiding in information retrieval and organization.

We have also created intelligent UI form handling capabilities that leverage UiPath specialized AI and the learnings from our award-winning Clipboard AI™. These activities accelerate development and reduce maintenance as they deal with a form as a single entity, rather than a collection of individual fields. They include:

• Form Fill: uses AI to complete a form. Given input data and a target scope as destination, the activity will use AI to map data to the available input fields, fill in the data, and submit the form.

• Form Copy: uses AI to read the data from a form. Given a target scope as source, the activity will use AI to extract data and map it to a derived data structure.

• Set Value: uses AI to input data into a single field. Given input data and a target scope as destination, the activity will use AI to map data to determine the correct value for the field and input it automatically.

All activities use the UiPath AI Trust Layer, ensuring you can use our GenAI-powered capabilities with confidence knowing company data and policies govern them.

Enterprise-grade cloud 

UiPath Automation Cloud™ provides the new cloud services infrastructure needed for Autopilot and our latest GenAI-powered activities. Automation is a ‘can’t-fail’ part of the IT landscape. Thus, UiPath Automation Cloud™ provides an enterprise-grade foundation to run and optimize crucial automation programs, at scale, and with simplicity.

In addition to powering the new features above, Automation Cloud has recently added:

• New Regions: India and UK are now available as additional Automation Cloud tenant regions.

• FedRAMP Certification: UiPath Automation Cloud Public Sector is now available to U.S. public sector customers and their approved partners. It is FedRAMP-authorized with an authority to operate (ATO). FedRAMP is a government-wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services across the United States (U.S.) federal government by providing a standardized approach to security and risk assessment. 

• Automation Cloud Delayed Update Ring EU Support: An advanced feature that enables customers to receive and test most new Automation Cloud features for at least 14 days before they are implemented in the production environment. This release extends current U.S. availability to include enterprise organizations hosted in our EU region.   

• Solutions Management: A robust way to manage the complete lifecycle of a project. The feature allows authorized users to create an automation solution made of multiple components and configurations, publish that self-contained package to any environment, then enable simple updates whenever a new version of the package becomes available. This simplifies moving an automation solution to a new tenant or completely different organization (e.g. dev to staging), and makes it easier for UiPath Partners to offer complex automation solutions to multiple customers.  

At UiPath On Tour London, we also announced that Automation Cloud has expanded to include two new regions where tenants can be hosted: India and the United Kingdom.

Next-generation AI and automation

Our new releases don’t just help our customers build better automations at speed. If your enterprise can develop, improve, and validate faster, you can ship your products and services quicker than the competition. This is the promise of AI realized: a competitive edge to capture the market.

To learn more and see our new Autopilot releases and GenAI innovations in action, register here for our latest release webinar.