Automation Anywhere, a leading intelligent automation services provider, has expanded its business automation services portfolio with the introduction of a new generative AI platform that aims to streamline organizational workflows through the discovery, development, and deployment of AI automation processes.
CEO and co-founder Mihir Shukla announced a set of enterprise solutions incorporating Gen AI tools and models at the company's annual Imagine event in Austin, Texas. Underlying the integrations are the company's Gen AI process models, which are designed to improve process discovery, automate tasks and improve accuracy in document processing. The models are tuned using metadata from over 300 million process automations running on the company's cloud-native platform.
Automation Anywhere's new AI agent creation platform, AI Agent Studio, enables businesses to build custom AI bots that can be trained on a company's data to make decisions and take action across the company's digital ecosystem.
The platform features low-code tools that allow developers to quickly create purpose-built AI agents to assist with specific cognitive tasks.
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Automation Anywhere claims that these solutions can reduce the time it takes to complete certain process tasks from hours to minutes, dramatically improving efficiency. Such improvements can significantly increase value across business workflows, including customer service operations, finance, IT, and HR.
Shukla said in his keynote that third-generation AI is “underestimated,” but the technology is “profoundly transformative.” “We only underestimate this technology at our own peril,” he said, comparing today's advances in AI to the internet revolution of the 1990s.
Expanding cloud partnerships
Apart from the Gen AI integration, Automation Anywhere also announced expanded partnerships with AWS and Microsoft Azure that aim to enable its Gen AI platform to deliver conversational automation and copilot capabilities within the cloud ecosystems of leading tech companies.
Asked whether expanding partnerships with cloud vendors would create competition, chief product officer Adi Kuruganti told The Hindu: “In terms of our core value proposition, we intend to be a multi-vendor, multi-model and contextual automation workflow provider. We are focused on building AI agents for workflow automation.”
AWS and Google Cloud do not offer specific business automation solutions, while Microsoft offers business automation through its Power Automate product.
As for Microsoft, Kurganti agreed, “There will be some overlap.” [with Microsoft]But that's OK because customers are using different products, and in some ways, from a technology and product standpoint, we want it to work that way — we don't want to create barriers through automation. [its] The definition needs to work across applications.”
Automation and its impact on labor
Automation Anywhere is strengthening its product lineup at a time when Gen AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude are winning hearts and minds with tools that have demonstrated a wide range of capabilities, allowing people to harness the power of AI through natural language text prompts.
These applications can now perform a variety of repetitive tasks, such as classifying and reorganizing data, an area where companies in the automation business are finding a strong use case for Gen AI in streamlining workflows.
UiPath, another leader in enterprise automation, is also enhancing its services with Gen AI capabilities and connecting them with cloud platforms from Google and Microsoft.
According to a McKinsey report on the economic potential of next-generation AI and automation, these changes in technology and business workflows could result in half of today's work activities being automated within the next 30 years – most of which will be cognitive tasks performed by knowledge workers.
The report notes that integrating Gen AI with other automation tools will boost productivity, but as new roles emerge, workers will need support through transition assistance and reskilling opportunities.
(The author was invited to the Imagine 2024 event in Austin, Texas.)
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