UiPath Agent Builder: AI agent development made simple

Introduction

In today's rapidly evolving enterprise landscape, organizations increasingly look to harness the power of agentic automation to automate complex, end-to-end processes. Agentic automation marks an evolutionary shift from traditional, rules-based automation to a more dynamic, context-aware approach. This is powered by autonomous, decision making AI agents, using capabilities like machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision to enhance their understanding, to learn, and to improve as humans do.

With the Private Preview release of UiPath Agent Builder in December 2024, we're excited to introduce a comprehensive low-code environment that enables automation developers to create, deploy, and manage enterprise-grade AI agents with unprecedented ease and control.

What is UiPath Agent Builder?

UiPath Agent Builder is a low-code, easy-to-use agent development tool available in UiPath Studio. It will help developers create, customize, evaluate, and deploy specialized enterprise agents that can understand context, make decisions, and execute complex processes while maintaining enterprise-grade security and governance.

Agent Builder represents a significant leap forward in democratizing AI agent development. Experienced developers and citizen developers alike can use the tool to develop reliable and effective AI agents that meet enterprise requirements for reliability, security, and governance. At the heart of Agent Builder is its agent planning, design, and playground. This is where developers can safely iterate and experiment with their agents before they have to consider what other components to add. Developers can define their agents' roles, goals, and constraints through natural language prompting. This makes it straightforward to create agents that align to specific business objectives and guardrails.

Agent Builder also uses UiPath context grounding to support a sophisticated memory architecture, enabling agents to retrieve relevant information only from permissioned, governed knowledgebases as well as maintain context. Context grounding also enables agents to calibrate their trajectory and subsequent plans dynamically and in a way that’s appropriate for the business and use case.

Agent Builder excels in comprehensive tooling integration, allowing agents to leverage various capabilities, from external system communication to complex task orchestration. The platform's human in the loop collaboration feature ensures AI and human intelligence work together effectively, with agents able to engage employees when needed for exception management.

Finally, Agent Builder includes robust evaluation and monitoring tools for optimal performance. These features allow for continuous refinement, and ensure agents remain effective and aligned with business objectives.

By combining these core features, UiPath Agent Builder empowers developers to create intelligent, adaptable, and reliable AI agents able to tackle complex, end-to-end processes efficiently.

UiPath agents in action - Dillan Hackett, Innovation Director, TQA Solutions

At TQA Solutions, we’re really excited to be exploring agentic automation with UiPath. Combining the increasing effectiveness of large language and large action modes with the already established capabilities of the UiPath Platform™ is a perfect match.

The power of agents and agentic solutions will largely rest on the models being used and the ability of these agents to‌ perform tasks, like interacting with systems and data, effectively. With UiPath Agents, you have the flexibility to utilize the latest third-party models as the brain of the agent, alongside the full automation capabilities of the UiPath Platform™. This puts UiPath in a leading position to facilitate the creation of effective enterprise agents, with no technology bias for particular tools and with an already huge library of potential actions and processes to perform.

Agentic automation opens up exciting opportunities for TQA Solutions. It will help us drive transformative business value by enabling systems that can leverage powerful decision making capabilities while operating autonomously. We see significant potential in use cases such as customer service optimization, where agentic bots can handle complex inquiries by dynamically interpreting context and executing multi-step processes. In sales intelligence processing, agentic automation can enhance data gathering, validation, data analysis, insights, and recommendations for next actions.

Additionally, agentic capabilities could revolutionize supply chain management through real-time decision making on inventory levels and demand forecasting, as well as streamline back-office operations like finance and HR by autonomously managing repetitive tasks and escalating only the most nuanced cases. These advancements empower businesses to do more with their automation capabilities, revisit previously rejected processes, elevate efficiency, reduce costs, and unlock new levels of innovation.

Creating powerful and reliable AI agents in UiPath Agent Builder is fast and seamless. Here is an example use case we developed at TQA Solutions. We used Agent Builder to create a ‘resourcing agent’ able to recommend suitable teams in response to new project requests.

UiPath Agent Builder differentiators

In their innovative use cases, the TQA Solutions team benefitted from a range of enterprise features that are unique to UiPath Agent Builder.

Enterprise-ready tools

UiPath Agent Builder stands out by providing enterprise-grade tools that integrate seamlessly with existing business systems and processes. UiPath Agents can use the full UiPath Platform, calling on best-in-class automation tools and capabilities including UI automations, intelligent document processing (IDP), API connectors, and multi-step complex workflows.

Human-centric design

Agent Builder’s human in the loop capabilities ensure that AI agents work collaboratively with human operators, maintaining the right balance between automation and human oversight. Humans are central to UiPath Agent design, enabling escalation and reviews to be built into workflows and processes with ease.

Low-code development

Low-code is at the core of the UiPath Platform. Low-code agent design democratizes agent development, enabling rapid creation and deployment while maintaining the flexibility to incorporate custom code when needed. Automation and citizen developers can build and evaluate high-quality agents with best-in-class evaluations and prompt writing assistance compared to code-centric methods.

Vendor-agnostic architecture

UiPath Agent Builder supports integration with various AI providers and enterprise systems, preventing vendor lock-in and enabling organizations to leverage their preferred technologies. Users can build agentic workflows across applications, models (including BYO), and agent ecosystems.

End-to-end process orchestration

Agent Builder excels at orchestrating complex processes involving multiple agents, robots, and human operators, ensuring smooth execution of enterprise workflows. Users are able to model, orchestrate, and debug end-to-end complex business processes that include robots, humans, and agents with a detailed understanding of the process graph.

Quality and accuracy

Built-in quality controls and accuracy measures ensure that UiPath Agents perform consistently and reliably in production environments:

• Enterprise-grade infrastructure

• Specialized AI, including best-in-class IDP capabilities and models

• Runtime evaluations of agent output

• AI-powered test automation

Comprehensive management

Robust management and monitoring capabilities provide visibility into UiPath Agent operations and performance, enabling proactive optimization and maintenance. These include:

• Comprehensive reporting, including real-time analytics, alerts, and historical reports

• Advanced insights (analytics)

• Tracing, version control, and reporting

Governance and trust

The UiPath AI Trust Layer ensures that agents operate within defined parameters, maintaining compliance with enterprise policies and regulations.

• Hybrid deployment flexibility

• Enterprise compliance and policy standards

• UiPath Agents leverage the same enterprise grade platform trusted to run millions of autonomous robots

Conclusion

The release of the UiPath Agent Builder marks a significant milestone in the evolution of agentic automation. By combining low-code accessibility with enterprise-grade capabilities, Agent Builder enables organizations to harness the power of AI agents while maintaining the control and governance required in enterprise environments.

Agent Builder will continue to evolve as the leading platform for enterprise AI agent development, maintaining its commitment to simplicity, extensibility, and enterprise-grade reliability. Our roadmap is focused on expanding the enterprise features of Agent Builder, with support for conversational agents in addition to unattended enterprise automation. We’ll expand ecosystem integration with new third-party tools, frameworks, and agent integrated development environments, and deliver enhanced governance and control features.

Finally, we’ll continue to push the value potential of agentic automation with advanced orchestration, intelligent task distribution, and automated process optimization capabilities.

We invite developers to explore UiPath Agent Builder and use it to develop powerful enterprise agents ready to drive complex, end-to-end process automations. Together, we can create intelligent, reliable, and governed AI agents that drive business value while maintaining the highest standards of security and control.

To get the earliest access to creating with UiPath Agent Builder, join our waiting list today.

Meanwhile, read our latest white paper published in collaboration with Lahiru Fernando, Practice Lead AI at Boundaryless Group: Getting started with agentic AI: Harnessing automation with intelligent agents.