Highlights from UiPath DevCon 2024

Introduction

On February 16, the UiPath Community in Bengaluru, India came together in our annual celebration of everything they love about automation development. A record number of automation professionals and enthusiasts interested in learning more about AI and automation spent the day learning more about UiPath products and what is coming soon, as well as sharing their unique perspectives and expertise.

For those of you who were not able to attend in person, all DevCon 2024 sessions will be available on demand starting February 28. To have access to all the in-depth demos and presentations from our Product Management team and community MVPs as soon as the videos are available, register now.

Main product highlights

Opening the developer conference, the CTO of UiPath, Munil Shah, made several exciting announcements about the future of UiPath tools and products.

UiPath Integration Service has just released Connector Builder, which allows you to build your own connectors for any API driven system. This really opens up the long tail of systems you want to work with. This is the same tool we use internally to build our out-of-the-box capabilities, connectors, and with which we plan to build more than 100 new integrations in 2024.

Let's talk about building this into complex projects and how difficult it is to keep everything in check. We all know that development is a team sport, and we need robust tooling and processes to help us work together as teams and keep us in the flow. UiPath Studio has included support for team development, reusability, and integration with leading source control systems such as Git for many years now. We also have centralized governance for automation projects in our UiPath Automation Ops offering.

At Devcon, we announced the availability of automation pipelines (CI/CD) for Automation Ops. This delivers several great capabilities, including extended control over Studio Web projects along with external repositories, support for Azure Repositories as well as GitHub and guarantees responsible AI usage across automation projects.

As automation projects are getting bigger and complex (a project may have multiple workflows, queues, data entities, ML skills, and so on) keeping all these moving parts in harmony with each iteration of your automation project can be tedious or even daunting. Solutions Management is a higher-level abstraction that brings together all these independent pieces that need to work together.

Starting today, Solutions Management offers a new way to manage the complete lifecycle of a project. The tool allows you to create a solution with all its components and configuration, publish that self-contained package to any environment, and enable simple updates whenever a new version of the package becomes available.

One of the most exciting announcements during the main keynote at FORWARD VI was the introduction of UiPath Autopilot™ for testers and the launch of the Private Preview. The interest has been inspiring, with over 400 individual participants onboarded so far. We are excited to announce that this can be accessed as of today in Public Preview and is on track to be generally available in April.

Software testing is still recognized as the biggest bottleneck to delivering innovations to customers. Autopilot for testers accelerates every aspect of software testing, leveraging Generative AI to refine and improve requirements, generate step-by-step tests from those requirements, and leverage these tests to generate coded automations.

Another tedious role of testing is troubleshooting failures. For this challenge, we have introduced Test Insights. This leverages generative technology to review execution logs and test results to help identify what failed and more importantly, why it failed. This capability will allow testers to dramatically reduce time to issue resolution.

Our vision is to empower software testers to perform at their highest potential, provided all testers are as good as the best one, across the entire testing lifecycle. Beyond merely enhancing the productivity of testers by helping them tackle testing challenges that were previously out of reach.

The Product Management team didn’t stop with Autopilot. Another exciting feature under development that will revolutionize how automation teams test and track the quality of their automations, the Process Heatmap for Test Manager. This risk-based visualization enables developers to identify which process automations require testing and provides ongoing insights to support developers in tracking the health of their automations. We are excited that this is targeted to be generally available by June.

As you might remember from FORWARD VI, our team has been busy developing our next-generation IDP solutions. Part of that, we are now proud to announce that we are bringing the active learning experience found in UiPath Communications Mining to UiPath Document Understanding. This can be accessed as of today in Public Preview.

Active learning greatly improves the speed of creating a model, from a week to just a day—which means 80% faster model training. It guides you, choosing the best samples to optimize your models for you and analyzes your models, providing built-in analytics and recommendations for improvement.

As we continue to support our expanding global footprint and growing our community in India, we are now announcing two new data centers: one for the UK and another for India. The new datacenter will provide better coverage for the local market, addressing the unique needs for data sovereignty and contributing to the digital transformation journey.

Daniel Dines closed the day-long extravaganza with an intimate fireside chat, where he talked about the long history of UiPath on the market in India, as well as our close ties with the community. In his new role as Chief Innovations Officer, he shared a brief view of where he sees the future of the automation market, as well as the future of UiPath given the changes that artificial intelligence will bring.

Conclusion

DevCon gave us all a chance to hear from experts in the field about the limitless potential of AI and automation, and how they can help organizations transform by improving productivity, streamlining business operations, and empowering employees to do more fulfilling work.

But most importantly, it gave us a huge chance to reconnect to our community, and our development roots. We want to thank all the speakers and attendees who made this conference a great success and helped kickstart what promises to be a great year for the UiPath Platform. We hope that everyone enjoyed new insights from the event, and in case you were not able to join, don’t forget to catch up with all the UiPath DevCon 2024 session recordings. Register now to get access to the videos as soon as they are available on February 28.