NelsonHall recently attended UiPath’s Forward VI event in Las Vegas, at which the company launched its Autopilot capabilities. While the company launched Autopilot across all its platform components, including Studio, Assistant, Apps, mining, and Test Manager, this blog focuses on its use within Studio and Assistant. 

Autopilot for Studio

A constant inhibitor to automation has been the capacity of organizations to build the automations. In the early days, automation relied on skilled developers writing code to build the automation. Platform vendors such as UiPath sought to tackle this inhibitor with the launch of low- and no-code IDEs such as UiPath Studio. However, while that development launched this current wave of automation, companies were still hamstrung by the number of employees trained on these platforms who were able to deliver these results.

Seeking to increase the number of employees that could develop automations, each of the platform vendors focused on increasing support for citizen developers, with UiPath launching StudioX as a simplified version of Studio; indeed, at Forward VI, Deloitte announced that it is committing to having 10% of its 415k employees trained on UiPath as part of a citizen developer drive.

Still, these efforts have not been enough to overcome the capacity issues within clients. To address these issues, UiPath has launched Autopilot for Studio, embedding the capability for users to write requirements for bots in natural language text, from which Autopilot then generates an automation in Studio.

This will not only support citizen developers; experienced developers are often handed bots from citizen developers to ensure the bot is enterprise-grade. With Autopilot, we can expect that the quality of the citizen-developed bot is increased. The demonstrations of Autopilot at the event showed faster bot development than the typical automation developer.

Autopilot for Assistant

On the second day of Forward VI, we also saw a demo of Autopilot for Assistant. Assistant is the interface that lets desktop users see and run all the automations. For the most part, this interface has been selecting automations to run from a list of bots or leveraging the beta of Clipboard AI functionality to quickly and automatically copy information from one interface or image into fields within applications.

With the launch of Autopilot for Assistant, users can now interact through natural language with the interface. This chat interface allows Autopilot to find bots that can answer users’ requests and run desktop automations live on the machine.

Importantly, this is not where the magic ends: if a user asks for something that cannot be completed using existing bots, Autopilot can use the same intelligence used in Autopilot for Studio to create bots that can leverage connectors within Autopilot for Studio to accomplish the task, prompting the human user for confirmation along the way. If the process is successful and the user believes that this automation would be useful, they may add this to the automation hub along with an automatically generated description of the process and the steps performed so that developers can perform any ‘last mile’ work to build the bot, which can be referenced in the future.

In the demo, we saw Assistant being asked to connect with a specific person on LinkedIn. Autopilot interpreted the request, launched a browser, searched for the person, and before requesting the connection, asked the user to confirm the action. In this manner, desktop automation through UiPath assistant is less hamstrung by developers or even citizen developers.

How these developments compare to the competition

UiPath isn’t the first automation platform provider to launch a copilot for their IDEs: in May this year we saw Automation Anywhere launch its copilot capabilities, and last month, Microsoft showed its copilot for Power Automate; both strive to offer bot generation through natural language. 

Where UiPath is ahead of the competition is in its secondary use case above, building bots on the fly to support digital assistants. This capability could not only boost the capability and quality of citizen developers, but reduce the need for them entirely.

Another difference we see with these offerings is their pervasiveness, with UiPath launching variants of its copilot across each platform component, including document understanding, test automation, apps, and mining. 

UiPath also shared a vision for the future that we did not hear from the competition: using these generative AI capabilities to build auto-healing robots; i.e. automatically fixing aspects that have broken using bot descriptions and the AI behind Autopilot, so reducing the ongoing management cost of bots. 

NelsonHall recently attended Automation Anywhere's 2020 innovation day, where the company launched its Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface (AARI) digital assistant focused on making bot usage easier and more accessible to employees.

Automation Anywhere Robotic Interface

AARI “aims to elevate employees' workflows in the same manner as at-home digital assistants such as Alexa and Siri have enhanced their home life” and increase the adoption of RPA in the front and back office.

The AARI application allows users to:

• Launch bots providing integrations to, for example, Salesforce, Google Sheets, and Microsoft Excel through a chat-based interface in addition to via the desktop application, mobile, and web interfaces. Automation Anywhere will also add voice support for accessing bots
• Provide form-style entry into the bot, with the information then disseminated to the client’s business applications
• Manage escalation scenarios.

Automation Anywhere expects CoEs to use AARI to create attended bots triggered using natural language conversations for workgroups or business users across front and back offices.

For example, in a contact center handling customer loans, once the CoE has established the logic behind loan terms and conditions, the workflow with AARI could be optimized to:

• Collect the customer data from across platforms before the call, and present it in the contact center’s CRM platform of choice (e.g., Salesforce)
• Provide forms during the call for the CX agent to populate with information from the conversation, which can then be used to populate the appropriate platforms, reducing the need for re-entry of information
• Extract unstructured information from emailed PDFs using IQ Bot and run credit checks in the background
• Suggest context-specific next-best actions incorporating business rules
• On a natural language command from the CX agent to AARI, such as ‘send over the new loan terms to this customer,’ use the previously established logic to create a set of terms and conditions and email them to the customer.

Early adopter client examples include:

• Colombian financial services firm Bancolombia using AARI to reduce in-branch wait times. The deployment of AARI was completed in one month and resulted in a $19m reduction in provision costs, 59% reduction in response time, and delivered a 1300% ROI in its first year
• CX BPO firm TaskUs using AARI to improve employee experience along with shorter training cycles and improved agent performance for a San Antonio-based client, resulting in a 20-second reduction in AHT, a 3.4% improvement in CSAT, and 2.7% improvement in call quality.

Interactions with AARI are created using standard drag-and-drop task items from the toolbox and can leverage Automation Anywhere's Discovery Bot and other features. AARI will be charged on a $35 per user per month basis.

How distinctive is the AARI concept?

• UiPath’s Forms feature provides an input form functionality similar to AARI to allow users to design forms for a user to input data, then disseminate the input data across its business applications, but does not allow users to launch bots through a conversational input with a digital assistant
• The NICE Employee Virtual Assistant (NEVA) acts as an automation finder to launch pre-existing processes and conversational AI-based scenarios but lacks form-style entry
• In the front office space, the use of bots to integrate platforms to reduce data entry and swivel chair activities is not new. Many of the CX Services vendors have had this form of capability for some years, in addition to handling escalation scenarios as a hygiene factor. These platforms do not, however, offer the automation capabilities of an RPA implementation. The CX vendors also have roadmaps to include features such as chatbots to capture sensitive information and assess the customer's tone to provide answers tailored to their emotional response.

Automation Anywhere differs in bringing together the form data entry capabilities of the RPA providers and CX vendors, and the more niche ability to interact with bots through more conversational means.

Last week, NelsonHall attended ANTENNA2020, AntWorks’ yearly analyst retreat. AntWorks has made considerable progress since its last analyst retreat, experiencing considerable growth (estimated at ~260%) in the three quarters ending January 2020, and employing 604 personnel at the end of this period.

By geography, AntWorks’ most successful geography remains APAC, closely followed by the Americas, with AntWorks having an increasingly balanced presence across APAC, the Americas, and EMEA. By sector, AntWorks’ client base remains largely centered on BFSI and healthcare, which together account for ~70% of revenues.

The company’s success continues to be based on its ability to curate unstructured data, with all its clients using its Cognitive Machine Reading (CMR) platform and only 20% using its wider “RPA” functionality. Accordingly, AntWorks is continuing to strengthen its document curation functionality while starting to build point solutions and building depth into its partnerships and marketing.

Ongoing Strengthening of Document Curation Functionality

The company is aiming to “go deep” rather than “shallow and wide” with its customers and cites the example of one client which started with one unstructured document use case and has over the past year introduced an additional ten unstructured document use cases resulting in revenues of $2.5m.

Accordingly, the company continues to strengthen its document curation capability, and recent CMR enhancements include signature verification, cursive handwriting, language extension, sentiment analysis, and hybrid processing. The signature verification functionality can be used to detect the presence of a signature in a document and verify it against signatures held centrally or on other documents and is particularly applicable for use in KYC and fraud avoidance where, for example, a signature on a passport or driving license can be matched with those on submitted applications.

This strategy of the depth of document curation functionality resonated strongly with the clients speaking at the event. In one such case, it was the depth of the platform allowing cursive and text to be analyzed together that led to an early drop out of a number of competitors tasked with building a POC that could extract cursive writing.

AntWorks also continues to extend the range of languages where it can curate documents; currently, 17 languages are supported. The company has changed the learning process for new languages to allow for quicker training on new languages, with support for Mandarin and Arabic available soon.

Hybrid processing enables multi-format documents containing, for example, text, cursive handwriting, and signatures to be processed in a single step.

Elsewhere, AntWorks has addressed a number of hygiene factors with QueenBOT, enhancing its business continuity management, auto-scaling, and security. Auto-scaling in QueenBOT to allow bots to switch between processes if one process requires extra assistance to meet SLAs, effectively allowing bots to be “carpenters in the morning and electricians in the evening,” increasing both SLA adherence and bot utilization.

Another key hygiene factor addressed in the past year has been training material. AntWorks began 2019 with a thin training architecture, with just two FTEs supporting the rapidly expanding company; over the past year, the number of FTEs supporting training has grown to 25, supporting the creation of thousands of hours of training material. AntWorks also launched its internship program, starting in India which has added 43 FTEs in 2019. The ambition this year is to go global with this program.

Announcement of Process Discovery, Email Agent & APaaS Offerings

Process discovery is an increasingly important element in intelligent automation, helping to remove the up-front cost involved in scaling use cases by identifying and mapping potential use cases.

AntWorks’ process discovery module enables organizations to both record the keystrokes taken by one or more users against multiple transactions or import keystroke data from third-party process discovery tools. From these recordings, it uses AI to identify the cycles of the process, i.e. the individual transactions, and presents the user with the details of the workflow, which can then be grouped into process steps for ease of use. The process discovery module can also be used to help identify the business rules of the process and assist in semi-automatic creation of the identified automations (aka AutoBOT).

The process discovery module aims to offer ease of use compared to competitive products and can, besides identifying transaction steps, be used to assist organizations in calculating the RoI on business cases and in estimating the proportions of processes that can be automated, though AntWorks is understandably reluctant to underwrite these estimates.

One of the challenges for AntWorks over the coming year is to develop standardized use cases/point solutions based on its technology components, initially in horizontal form, and ultimately verticalized. Two of these just announced are Email Agent and Accounts Payable as-a-Service (APaaS).

Email Agent is a natural progression for AntWorks given its differentiation in curating unstructured documents, built on components from the ANTstein full-stack and packaged for ease of consumption. It is a point solution designed solely to automate email traffic and encompasses ML-based email classification, sentiment analysis to support email prioritization, and extraction of actionable data. Email Agent can also respond contextually via templated static or dynamic content. AntWorks estimates that 40-50 emails are sufficient for training for each use case such as HR-related email.

The next step in the development of Email Agent is the production of verticalized solutions by training the model on specific verticals to understand the front office relations organizations (such as those in the travel industry) have with their clients.

APaaS is a point solution consisting of a pre-trained configuration of CMR to extract relevant information from invoices which can then be API’d into accounting systems such as QuickBooks. Through these point solutions offered on the cloud, AntWorks hopes to open up the potential for the SME market.

Focusing on Quality of Partnerships, Not Quantity

Movement on AntWorks’ partner ecosystem (now ~66) has been slower than expected, with only a handful of partners added since last year's ANTENNA event, despite its expansion being a priority. Instead, AntWorks has been ensuring that the partnerships it does have and signs are deep and constructive. Examples of these deep partnerships include Bizhub and Accenture, two partners who have been added and that are helping train CMR in Korean and Thai respectively in exchange for some timed exclusivity in those countries.

AntWorks is also partnering with SBI Group to penetrate the South East Asia marketplace, with SBI assisting AntWorks in implementing the ability to carry out data extraction in Japanese. Elsewhere, AntWorks has partnered with the SEED Group based in Dubai and chaired by Sheikh Saeed Bin Ahmed Al Maktoum to access the MENA (Middle East & North Africa) region.

New hire Hugo Walkinshaw was brought in to lead the partnership ecosystem very recently, and he has his work cut out for him, as CEO Ash Mehra targets a ratio of direct sales to sales through partners of between 60:40 and 50:50 (an ambitious target from the current 90:10 ratio). The aim is to achieve this through the current strategy of working very closely with partners, signing exclusive partnerships where appropriate, and targeting less mature geographies and emerging use cases, such as IoT, where AntWorks can establish a major presence.

In the coming year, expect AntWorks to add more deep partnerships focused on specific geographic presence in less mature markets and targeted verticals, and possibly with technology players to support future plans for running bots on embedded devices such as ships.

Continuing to Ramp Up Marketing Investment

AntWorks was relatively unknown 18 months ago but has made a major investment in marketing since then. AntWorks attended ~50 major events in 2019, possibly 90 events in total, counting all minor events. However, AntWorks’ approach to events is arguably even more important than the number attended, with the company keen to establish a major presence at each event it attends. AntWorks does not wish to be merely another small booth in the crowd, instead opting for larger spaces in which it can run demos to support the interest in clients and partners.

This appears to have had the desired impact. Overall, AntWorks states that in the past year it has gone from being invited to RFIs/RFPs in 20% of cases to 80% and that it intends to continue to ramp up its marketing budget.

A series B round of funding, currently underway, is targeted on expanding its marketing investments as well as its platform capabilities. Should AntWorks utilize this second round of funding as effectively as its first with SBI Investments 2 years ago, we expect it to act as a springboard for exponential growth and these deep relationships and continue to lead in middle- and back-office intelligent automation use cases with high volumes of complex or hybrid unstructured documents.