Expert Insights
What You Missed at UiPath Forward
October 2019 turned out to be a defining moment for the RPA and Automation Industry with UiPath’s Annual Conference, Forward III held in Las Vegas, Nevada. This conference brought together over 2500 UiPath customers, users, partners, industry media experts, and analysts to discuss all things automation. The main focus of this year’s conference was to get one step closer to achieving UiPath CEO, Daniel Dines’, dream of having “1 Bot for every person”. To achieve this goal, a major focus of the event was to further teach and spread the idea of practicing an automation first mindset. The Automation First Mindset is a way of thinking where one is constantly reimagining doing a task, process, or entire workflow more efficiently through continuous analysis and automation. Although this is a great stride towards achieving the Dines Dream, in order to make 1 bot for every person even more possible there needs to be new innovations and programs added to the RPA and AI technology toolbox, which is exactly what UiPath plans to do. At the conference UiPath announced several amazing new tools and are ready to unleash them into the market as soon as this year! Below is a list and detailed description of all the exciting new items UiPath is launching soon.
The first new tool unveiled was Studio X. Studio X is the new, easy to use interface from UiPath that truly is a “no code” tool that allows any business user, regardless of programming experience, to be able to automate common business tasks. The tool allows you to ‘chain’ previous workflows created from Studio and Community editions of UiPath and integrate them with newly created automations from the Studio X platform. The intuitive error handling and labels allow ‘citizen developers’ to be able to create full-fledged automations that can be used in the enterprise seamlessly even though they are created by an employee that may have little to no previous background in development.
As an addition to UiPath Studio, the new UiPath Insights tool gives you a customizable and more in-depth view of your robot’s performance, allowing you to forecast critical KPIs and milestones, including robot utilization and process bottlenecks, the ability to create custom reports and summary’s using Natural Language Generation and much more.
Now that anyone can build a bot easily on their desktop, without a prior knowledge of development and coding, how can we prevent time wasted on automating processes that aren’t necessarily the best fit for automation or don’t offer an ROI that makes it worthwhile? UiPath Connect is the solution. UiPath Connect allows the business user and Center of Excellence (COE) to identify and capture automation opportunities by utilizing a centralized tool that can identify automation opportunities based upon pre-set parameters that are established by common business users, or experienced business analysts. The custom algorithm used by Connect determines the output based upon the current capability of the organization and which processes are a better fit for automation in the current pipeline over others.
Taking the Connect capabilities one step further, the next new tool UiPath announced was UiPath Explorer. The UiPath Explorer helps determine which area of the business you should start with or put priority on when starting an automation program. Explorer allows the business to understand how an organization actually functions by taking core data elements and tracking their routes. The Explorer is able to effectively deconstruct an Organization and what areas are involved, which is a major game-changer as one of the most difficult functions of an RPA program is being able to identify which area of an Organization should be focused on first. Through the UiPath Explorer, businesses will be able to effectively identify the areas that will provide the most value in the shortest time-span.
Moving beyond RPA and looking towards the next step of digital optimization, AI innovations were also showcased at Forward, one of these was the new AI Fabric tool. AI Fabric closes the gap in the endless loop of understanding where AI and Machine Learning (ML) models fit into an Organization. AI and ML require data; however, it requires data that is both beneficial and within context to an Organization, which is the need that AI Fabric meets. This tool also has the capability to uncover openings in processes that when filled can be utilized to capitalize on the best possible AI and ML opportunities.
UiPath also announced the addition of AI Skills to the automation tool set. AI Skills takes a step ahead by adding new Document Extraction and Computer Vision capabilities. This allows users to not only have access to a faster tool to extract data from Invoices, Receipts, and such with, but offers a more accurate navigation on virtual desktop interfaces (VDI), Flash, Silverlight, PDFs, and images.
With the unveiling of these new tools comes even more possibilities for automation in the workplace. As the technology improves, the automations improve, and the more time and money the organizations that implement it properly can save. If you have any further questions about the capabilities of these new UiPath tools and what they can do for your enterprise automation program, please contact info@accelirate.com