Marking a moment when automation and AI combine forces to achieve more, Automation Anywhere (AA) announced an array of generative AI-powered innovations at the Imagine conference in Austin, Texas, aimed to help companies put automation and AI to work across enterprises.
Citing a McKinsey study which predicts that generative AI is going to help automate up to 70 percent of the work done today so organizations can drive more high-value impact, AA’s CEO, Mihir Shukla, said that this year marks a very pivotal inflection point.
“With the convergence of automation plus AI, we find ourselves in a moment in history, like the birth of a computer, or the internet, a moment that has reshaped our world irreversibly. Today’s power of automation plus AI is so profound that it will impact every single industry, every single company, every single department and virtually every single role,” he said during his keynote address.
Building on last year’s announcement of Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users, which enabled business teams to embed automation in applications like Salesforce, SAP, Genesys and Microsoft Teams, earlier this year, AA added generative AI to the Automation Co-Pilot – a tool which can work across application boundaries, handle complex workflows and adhere to governance rules.
The company has also recently enhanced its Document Automation tool with a boost of generative AI so it gains the ability to understand, extract and summarize data for 70 percent or more of automations that involve a document. This feature now supports the quick processing of semi-structured and unstructured document types, including contracts, waybills, packing lists and loan applications.
In its second round of announcements during the conference, AA unveiled the expansion of Automation Co-Pilot for Automators along with the launch of Autopilot.
Automation Co-Pilot for Automators is said to come with new capabilities aimed to empower citizen and professional developers to rapidly create powerful, customized automations using natural language prompts to lower the barrier to automation creation across enterprises.
The new addition of Autopilot in turn can give customers the ability to streamline automation development from process understanding to automation deployment – often a months-long process across multiple teams. With human validation along the way, Autopilot can generate end-to-end automation based on enterprise process mapping, using the power of GenAI. As part of this journey, Autopilot brings together Process Discovery, CoE Manager and Automation Co-Pilot for Automators to enable workers with a particular task to go from process discovery to automation creation in minutes, even using process documents from third-party vendors.
With these enhanced additions empowering users to automate more work and accelerate automation development, AA emphasizes the security and governance of the AI tools. For this reason, it also announced the launch of a new set of capabilities and best practices including the ability for teams to select and manage generative AI models, test and optimize those models, create and manage reusable templates, mask sensitive data and audit automation performance.
In a strive to also boost the speed of generative AI deployment, AA has introduced enhanced integrations with Google Cloud, AWS and others, and the expansion of its Pathfinder Community to include a new generative AI community group, a generative AI skills booster series and an expert-led guidance on hyperscaling with AI.
Shukla added: “[Automation plus AI] will change how we live our lives and most importantly, how we will transform our businesses. The future that we are entering is going to continue to evolve… But make no mistake, it is not on the distant horizon. This epic transformation is happening today. And you will hear this from many customers in the next two days. Echoing this again and again.”
