UiPath Inc., a business automation platform, is entering a new era with the rise of generative artificial intelligence as part of the enterprise workflow.
The company is now focused on orchestrating gen AI agents and robots as part of its platform, building on its history of automated business operations. This coordination between people and robots is the future, according to Daniel Dines (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of UiPath Inc.
UiPath’s Daniel Dines talks with theCUBE about agentic AI.
“We aim to combine all of these data to give an enterprise a 360 view of all the transactions that happened in the enterprise,” he said. “Of course, building the agent itself, we are introducing this agent builder, which is a low-code technology to build agents. We aim that the persona that builds automations today — robots today — will be capable of building agent. It makes a lot of sense to deploy them together, to have agents and robots really working side by side.”
Dines spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and co-host Rebecca Knight at UiPath Forward 2024, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed UiPath’s new strategy and how AI is impacting the user experience. (* Disclosure below.)
Transforming enterprise workflow with agentic AI
UiPath is beginning its second act by harnessing the power of unstructured AI, according to Dines. Previously, the company was only able to automate repetitive business actions based on structured data.
“That was really limiting, because if you look into enterprise processes, many of them will have a mix of rule-based tasks and the unstructured type … and sometimes they are intermingled, so it’s not so easy to separate them,” he said. “We have to learn how can we deploy this gen AI technology that is capable of navigating the unstructured part. But the biggest challenge is this technology has agency [that] is non-deterministic. So, how can we make a non-deterministic technology reliable, and how can we deliver into an enterprise workflow context that should be reliable?”
A platform that coordinates all of the data between robots, enterprise workers and agents is the next step, according to Dines. Agentic AI is only useful if deployed as part of an orchestrated action between robots and humans.
“The way we are managing robots and deploy[ing] robots today will be very similar for agents,” Dines said. “All the audit trays that we use for robots will be similar for agents. So, every application that an agent will touch [and] everything an agent will decide, will be fully auditable using our existing platform. We have the enterprise workflow … we have to evolve our process orchestration technology to be capable of handling agents better.”
User interface is in UiPath’s name, and it will continue to be a crucial element of the company’s business. Although aspects of the enterprise workflow will continue to be automated, UI is going away any time soon, Dines added.
“The most relevant transformation is how we will deliver the work itself,” he said. “It’s a dramatic shift in how we are going to work. So, I think we are going to use less applications than before for doing clearly repetitive work. I’m not sure the nature of the interface is going to necessarily change. You cannot act only via natural languages and applications. I don’t think it’s practical.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of UiPath Forward 2024:
(* Disclosure: UiPath Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither UiPath nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)