The News: Automation Anywhere announced an expansion of its Automation Success Platform, which includes the launch of new tools that deliver AI-powered automation across an enterprise’s teams, systems, and processes. Announced during the company’s Imagine 2023 customer event, the company unveiled its Autopilot tool, a Responsible AI Layer, and new and expanded features in Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users, Automation Co-Pilot for Automators, and Document Automation.
According to Automation Anywhere, Automation Co-Pilot for Automators is available today in beta and will be generally available in early 2024. Autopilot will be available in early 2024.
You can read a press release with details of the announcement on Automation Anywhere’s website.
Automation Anywhere Unveils Generative AI-Driven Automation Platform
Analyst Take: Automation Anywhere announced an expansion of its Automation Success Platform during Imagine 2023. The expansion includes new and expanded features in Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users, Automation Co-Pilot for Automators, and Document Automation, and a brand-new tool, Autopilot, which enables the rapid development of end-to-end automations from Process Discovery, using the power of generative AI.
Automation Anywhere also unveiled a new Responsible AI Layer, which includes new, custom generative AI automation models developed on top of external large language models (LLMs). The models are then trained with anonymized metadata from millions of automations. The new Responsible AI Layer also includes additional AI tools and security and governance capabilities that are core to the next generation of automation development.
Accelerate Business User Productivity via New Use Cases and LLM Integration
Like many enterprise platforms, Automation Anywhere has been focused on announcing and rolling out new generative AI tools and capabilities to keep up in what can best be described as an AI arms race. The company announced its first wave of generative AI innovations in June 2023, and as of this announcement, Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users and Document Automation solutions have expanded to include new use cases and LLM integration capabilities.
Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users is designed to seamlessly embed automation directly into a business or web application. Leveraging generative AI technology, Automation Co-Pilot can handle additional use cases, such as email triage and routing for customer service teams, anti-money laundering alerts and reporting in the banking sector, and generation of after-visit summaries for patients in healthcare. Similarly, Document Automation, an intelligent document processing solution, is now designed to leverage generative AI for faster content understanding, extraction, and summarization of data. It supports semi-structured and unstructured document types and supply chain use cases, such as waybills, packing slips, purchase orders, and contracts, thereby helping to reduce or eliminate manual data handling time by up to 80% and increasing team productivity.
A common trait found in all of these use cases is the presence of repetition; the ability to reduce the level of human interaction with repetitive processes and data can not only reduce effort and costs but can also improve accuracy and reliability. Although generative AI must be refined before it can be relied upon to handle higher function tasks, such as truly interactive two-way customer interactions, the Automation Anywhere approach is particularly well-suited to these types of use cases. Automation Anywhere is smart to focus on these processes, which still account for a significant amount of time, effort, and money, while helping to position generative AI into use cases where it is likely to quickly demonstrate ROI.
Leveraging Generative AI To Empower Business Automators
Another key task that has received a significant amount of attention and focus from automation platform providers is using generative AI to make it easier for non-developers to quickly create automations or stand up new applications without using traditional code. This use case is particularly important in today’s ever-changing enterprise environment, where business users might demand new functions, features, or data sources be implemented quickly, often in a matter of hours or days instead of weeks or months.
Automation Anywhere’s Autopilot is designed to automatically source new automation opportunities and transform them into end-to-end automation, using generative AI to stitch together Process Discovery, CoE Manager, and Automation Co-Pilot for Automators, enabling faster automation development. In addition, Automation Co-Pilot for Automators uses generative AI to help citizen developers, business users, and experienced professional developers use natural language prompts to create end-to-end automations while making real-time suggestions on the next possible action in automation workflows.
AI Tools, Governance, and AI Best Practices
Automation Anywhere also introduced a set of AI tools, governance, and best practices as part of its Responsible AI Layer. These capabilities are designed to assist organizations with building and scaling AI-powered automations with the required guardrails in place, without requiring a dedicated team of AI specialists or data scientists. These new tools and capabilities will be available in early 2024 and include:
- Model Selection: Automation Anywhere users can manage generative AI models across a wide range of LLM providers through which Automation Anywhere’s open platform can securely integrate. Secure customer instances ensure that all data processing is done within a customer-governed tenant and data is encrypted to ensure data privacy and security.
- Testing and Optimization: Automation Anywhere users have access to tools to test models, and the inclusion of prompts is designed to assist with generating the best results for their specific use cases. This function also includes the ability to improve performance with in-product guidance on how to fine-tune models.
- Prompt Templates: Automation Anywhere users can begin with a curated library of prompt templates for each model or develop their own. These reusable and managed templates for enterprises make it easier to quickly generate results with minimal wasted effort.
- Data Privacy Controls: Customizable controls are designed to offer extra layers of protection and guardrails for an enterprise, including a set of data masking capabilities to ensure sensitive data remains under control and within the enterprise environment.
- Monitoring and Audit: Automation Anywhere is including a new set of generative AI analytics and audit tools integrated into the command center so that users can monitor model performance and check for violations of data privacy.
Implementing Partnerships To Drive More Integrations and Community Knowledge
In addition to the wave of new automation tools, Automation Anywhere is scaling up its partner ecosystem to introduce enhanced integrations with Google Cloud and AWS, among others. The company also is expanding user support within its Pathfinder Community to include a new generative AI community group, a generative AI skills booster series, and expert-led guidance on scaling across the enterprise with AI.
These efforts likely will be key for ensuring that enterprise users—from technical developers to business unit workers—are able to extract the most value from the platform and generative AI. As generative AI is still in a very nascent stage, collaboration with others on best practices for deployment, security, and trust will remain as or more important than constantly rolling out new features or capabilities.
Further, as with some other major platform vendors including Pegasystems and Salesforce, Automation Anywhere has taken a smart approach to AI model governance and transparency, clearly conveying how it plans to deploy generative AI responsibly and offering the tools to further assist its customers. Despite the commercial market for generative AI products being less than a year old, it is heartening to see major vendors detailing how they plan to manage trust, cybersecurity, and responsible use as they roll out products and services.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
