The 2024.10 release: Moving UiPath toward agentic automation while enhancing our core

At our recent UiPath FORWARD conference, UiPath CEO Daniel Dines presented the vision for “Act Two” of UiPath: advancing from our position as a leader in robotic process automation (RPA) to become the world’s preferred enterprise platform for agentic automation. And Chief Product Officer Graham Sheldon’s product roadmap presentation laid out the key goals and milestones for achieving that vision.

The 2024.10 release is an important stepping stone on the path to that vision, with a range of new agentic features and the general availability of UiPath Autopilot™ for everyone. In keeping with our objective to build our agentic automation capabilities on the trusted foundation of the UiPath Platform™, this release also includes dozens of other new capabilities and features. These enhance the core platform’s end-to-end integration, enterprise governance, openness, and delivery flexibility.

For our Automation Suite customers, this release also makes available many of the new things we’ve provided to our UiPath Automation Cloud™ customers over the last year through our biweekly updates.

With these and other capabilities, the 2024.10 release brings us further into a future where enterprises can automate even the most complex enterprise processes that today require extensive human intervention.

We’ve organized the launch features into the four themes summarized below. This blog covers the main product enhancements within them. We hope you’ll also attend our virtual launch event, where you can hear and see more details about our second act, and the new capabilities we’re launching today.

1. From task to process

Agentic AI now gives agents the capabilities to automate complex, probabilistic, and highly variable workflows that RPA robots can’t handle on their own. The advent of agents massively expands the surface area of automation and opens up many key enterprise processes to end-to-end automation.

But to make end-to-end automation a reality, developers must be given tools that let them see, understand, and optimize processes from start to finish. This release provides those capabilities, with enhancements to process intelligence, management, and orchestration that help customers automate, model, improve, and monitor complex processes across the enterprise.  

The release includes a new process diagram canvas in UiPath Studio that significantly simplifies the creation and oversight of end-to-end process automation. Now, users can employ business process modeling to plan steps, decisions, and flows and easily ensure that tasks connect to the wider process. They can integrate and manage existing business rules in UiPath Orchestrator. They can also use business rules in workflows or process diagrams with role-based access and versioning—no redeployment required.

We’ve also updated workforce and task management features. Enhancements like setting timers for tasks and triggering automatic notifications, coupled with predefined rules, roles, and skills for task assignments, make it easier than ever to build processes in the UiPath Platform.

2. The productivity power of UiPath Autopilot™

This release marks the general availability of UiPath Autopilot for everyone. This new Autopilot experience enables employees throughout a company—Mac and Windows users, non-technical workers, people at every level and in every department—to reap major agentic productivity benefits.

We’re tremendously excited about Autopilot for everyone, because it includes a number of features that increase its utility and impact. For one thing, it works across virtually all enterprise systems and apps. So, for example, it can fly through workflows that involve Outlook, Salesforce, and Workday (or dozens of other enterprise apps, for that matter). And available connectors—such as the one we’ve built with Microsoft—make it easy for Autopilot to work harmoniously with enterprise apps' copilots.

Another big benefit: Autopilot for everyone includes access to UiPath Clipboard AI™, our award-winning capability for automating digital paperwork. So now, users can take manual copy-and-paste out of their workdays.

Autopilot for everyone is secure, governed, and customizable for organizations and specific teams. And, as we announced at FORWARD, we’re launching it with a “free-to-get-started” offer. For a deeper dive, check out this blog.

3. A new developer perspective

The 2024.10 release demonstrates our ongoing commitment to improve developers’ experiences and boost their productivity, with new developer tools that make it even easier to design, build, test, and launch high-performing automations. In particular, it zeroes in on API automation and enhances the core capabilities that allow developers to integrate and orchestrate their complex ecosystem of applications, systems, and data sources.

Some notable features: HTTP requests in connectors and features let you pause workflows until certain tasks or events are done in other apps, making it easier to create complex API automations. A data mapping and transformation capability in UiPath Studio Web brings new opportunities for developers. Inside an improved Connector Builder, you can now trigger custom connectors when events happen. And once you build them, this release also makes it easy to share those connectors in UiPath Marketplace.

We’ve also added some great new capabilities in the testing area to boost speed, efficiency, and accuracy. New features in Autopilot for testers include AI-accelerated search and importing, robust low-code test automation, and AI-enabled test data generation. We've also enhanced reporting capabilities for large test portfolios, with new in-tool dashboards that provide instant insights into important KPIs and an embedded designer for building out custom-tailored test reports. For more details, check out this blog.

We’ve continued to make it easier for developers to bring GenAI and specialized AI models into their automations. With UiPath DocPath LLM now available for fine-tuning in UiPath Document Understanding™ modern projects, it’s easy to leverage active learning to customize the model for your own document types. That includes receipts, passports, health insurance cards, bank statements, insurance forms, and much more.

When it comes to more complex unstructured documents, such as contracts, loan applications, lease agreements, or brokerage statements, the new generative extraction experience in Document Understanding has it handled. Launched in private preview in October, it offers enhanced support for complex data like tables and long (>100-page) documents. The experience also includes flexible prompt and model configuration, improved model performance evaluation, and production-grade model governance.

Finally, we’ve improved developer and business user experience for human validation. When it comes to AI-based automations, it’s crucial to deliver a holistic human-in-the-loop experience. That's why we’ve introduced more powerful integrated human validation for end-to-end intelligent document processing (IDP) and agentic task automations with UiPath Apps. Now developers can customize user experiences and display business context within one screen—making human validation much more efficient. We invite you to sign up for the private preview here.

4. Flexible, cost-effective platform delivery

This release continues our delivery of new capabilities in a cloud-first model. We typically follow this with an available self-host option for those customers who need the highest level of control. Automation Cloud, our most comprehensive delivery option, is updated every two weeks and contains all the capabilities we’ve talked about above. With this release, we deliver Automation Suite 24.10, bringing many of those features to self-hosting for the first time.  

Both Automation Cloud and Automation Suite are also designed to offer easy, reliable enterprise delivery and governance. We want to focus specifically on some new features in these areas in this blog.

Automation Cloud Dedicated enters private preview, providing a tailored SaaS solution that delivers the advantages of Automation Cloud while supporting isolated computing and data storage. Aimed at larger customers who seek the flexibility of SaaS, but also need additional control, it features flexible upgrade options, customer-managed keys (CMK) for all services, and additional connectivity options.

U.S. public sector customers benefit from new capabilities in Automation Cloud Public Sector. VM Automation Cloud Robots are now available, along with the addition of GenAI features such as Document Understanding enhancements and Autopilot for testers.

We’ve added a range of new features to UiPath Automation Cloud through our releases every two weeks. One of the newest: we’re empowering all users with personalized, consistent experiences. We’ve added features like tenant and service trimming so administrators can control tenant and service visibility, and unified admin screens that give administrators a clear view of all user permissions and roles.

To simplify secure enterprise management, this release also adds the Tenant Administrator role, which enables organization-level administrators to securely delegate responsibilities to specific tenant administrators. That makes it easier to scale appropriate management across the largest organizations.

The 2024.10 release makes many of the capabilities in this blog available for enterprise self-hosting in Automation Suite. Also new in Automation Suite 24.10 is a new delivery option: support for Red Hat OpenShift. This complements existing options for AKS, EKS, and Linux. We’ve also added the ability to deploy on a shared cluster for AKS, EKS, and OpenShift. A new Automation Suite lite mode offers a lower infrastructure entry point on Linux, AKS, and EKS. Finally, AKS and EKS implementations now support Studio Web and Integration Service.

All of these features, and many more, are now available in Automation Cloud and Automation Suite. If you’re a new user, you can get a 60-day free trial of Automation Cloud by clicking here.

Well, this blog has gotten quite long…and yet, we’ve only touched the surface of all that’s new in the latest release! Once again, if you’d like to go a little deeper, we invite you to attend our virtual launch event by registering here.