Automation Anywhere takes business process automation to the next level with generative AI

Automation Anywhere Inc., a business process automation software company, today announced at its annual user conference its new AI + Automation Enterprise System, which incorporates the latest advancements in generative artificial intelligence into its products.

The new service was announced at Imagine 2024 and is built around a set of new AI agents built using the company's proprietary AI Agent Studio platform. The company says these agents accelerate process discovery and speed up the development and deployment of more powerful automation, improving business efficiency and enabling significant productivity gains and cost savings.

Automation Anywhere is a leader in a field known as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which is AI-powered software designed to mimic the work of human workers. RPA tools are used to automate routine, repetitive business processes, like data entry, allowing humans to focus on higher-value tasks.

According to the company, the new AI + Automation Enterprise System is designed to take automation to the next level. The new enterprise AI agents can create more advanced RPA bots to handle complex tasks that require more advanced cognitive skills. The bots can learn from enterprise data, make appropriate decisions, and take actions across all enterprise systems of record, the company explained.

Automation Anywhere co-founder and CEO Misir Shukla (pictured) said every business today feels pressured to work smarter and become more productive and efficient. “Automation is helping achieve that goal in part,” he said. “Automating with AI agents goes even further than that and is a breakthrough in automating the seemingly impossible.”

Next-generation AI agents that accelerate automation

Automation Anywhere's next-generation enterprise AI agents are unique in that they have generative AI built in, allowing you to extend process automation beyond rule-based work. They combine AI and actions to perform more complex tasks, like identifying and replacing products when they're out of stock. And they can learn and adapt as they mature, allowing you to automate these complex tasks more quickly over time.

Customers can design their own automations using the new AI Agent Studio, a low-code environment for building, managing, and governing customized generative AI agents capable of handling cognitive tasks. Users simply select the base model they need, connect it to a dataset to enrich its knowledge with context, and package it with pre-tuned prompts to ensure the output is appropriate for the task at hand.

The company also built enhanced security and governance controls to protect enterprise data and monitor the output of its models, the company said. These tools include guardrails to ensure consistency and rapid testing to limit AI hallucinations, where an AI fabricates responses.

In addition to the AI ​​Agent Studio, customers can also leverage pre-built AI agents, such as the new Document Automation Agent, which can process all kinds of documents, including unstructured documents, in real time. The company says the agent can extract and summarize information, including complex tabular data embedded in files, and use the insights it gathers to perform a variety of tasks.

Enhanced automation workflows

Also announced today is a new Automator AI tool that is said to speed up the automation development lifecycle. The tool's underlying engine is driven by the company's proprietary generative AI process models, which can be enhanced with third-party large-scale language models and fine-tuned with additional data.

Automator AI features include Autopilot, which can translate natural language commands into automated process flows, reducing development time by up to 30%, the company says. This allows users to go from discovery to automation in a very short time, with process documentation quickly converted into automation drafts by generative AI.

Additionally, separate from Automator AI's autopilot, there is the new Automation Co-Pilot, designed to handle conversational automation requests from users. Available in preview and integrated with Amazon Q, it provides real-time, on-demand assistance to help workers find the information they need or request automation for a specific task. Because it is conversational, it understands the user's request and provides the answer they are looking for or suggests automations that can be run for the applications they are built in.

Finally, the company announced a new Service Operations Solution Accelerator, now available, that helps teams get started using AI agents packaged for a range of service operations, including order management, returns processing and customer service question and answering.

Maureen Fleming, an analyst at International Data Corp., believes the updates announced today will help Automation Anywhere customers get more out of their existing AI investments.

“These latest enhancements make AI-powered automation even more accessible and empower organizations and employees to use AI in new ways, helping them work smarter than ever before,” she said.

Shukla appeared on SiliconANGLE Media's mobile livestreaming studio, theCUBE, in April and during his coverage of Google Cloud Next 2024, he explained the various ways in which generative AI is transforming automation.

Photo: SiliconANGLE