UiPath announces quartet of upgrades to its Business Automation Platform

Robotic process automation (RPA) firm UiPath has announced a quartet of new features that will soon be coming to its Business Automation Platform.

UiPath Studio Web is the first of the new platform updates that builds upon the existing UiPath Studio and StudioX products.

It’s a browser-based automation development tool that aims to simplify the creation of public-facing apps and processes for various use cases.

UiPath said the tool brings new capabilities such as a connection builder to link APIs ​​to both in-house applications and bespoke industry solutions, while offering the opportunity to develop automations on a cross-platform basis.

Studio Web was used by Microsoft to organise a raffle in which conference delegates participated. It was able to develop a web app to log each entrant and randomly pick winners, sending them bespoke emails confirming their prize automatically.

The company has also bundled three individual improvements under a moniker of ‘continuous discovery’, as part of its first day of its Forward 5 conference.

UiPath said customers are now able to investigate the as-is state of processes and take actions based on the result, while also being able to continuously monitor other processes to identify areas that can be tweaked for better profitability, for example.

‘Continuous discovery’ brings improvements to the UiPath Automation Hub through new return on investment (ROI) capabilities, offering comparisons between estimated benefits and actual outcomes.

New analytics features are coming to Process Mining - a tool used to understand how humans and software robots interoperate on different task - for better insights, as well as general performance improvements.

UiPath’s Task Mining product, which scans staff workflows and suggests the most efficient automations, will also receive a new assisted mode. This will allow those involved in developing the automations to add in their own insights in addition to what the tool’s AI learns.

The third big feature coming to the platform is Communication Mining, a feature born out of the standalone product developed by Re:infer, a natural language processing company that UiPath acquired in August.

Communication Mining will allow businesses to analyse emails, chat logs, and other communication channels to open up new automation opportunities from within the UiPath Business Automation Platform.

The technology can be used in collateral management scenarios, for example, where teams send a large volume of margin call emails to trading counterparties. These emails are usually met with one of three responses: agree, partially agree, and dispute.

Assuming the centralised margin call email inbox has communication mining enabled, automations can be configured to take the responses, filter them by the response type, and send them to the necessary internal teams without any human intervention.

Speaking at Wednesday’s Forward 5 conference keynote, Rushabh Shah, programme director of intelligent automation at Deutsche Bank, told delegates that the financial institution has been using the technology across the business, leading to savings of “weeks and months of work”.

“When you can understand every message flowing through your business, you can understand all your customers' needs, all of your business' problems, and the bottlenecks you have in your processes,” said Ed Challis founder and CEO at RE:infer. “And what's more important is you can uncover all of the great automation opportunities.”

New enterprise-focused features in UiPath Automation Cloud and Automation Suite complete the new platform features, with the former receiving new security capabilities such as IP range restriction.

Automation Suite sees process mining embeded within the platform for the first time after previously only being available through an on-prem installation model.

Serverless robots are also soon to become part of Automation Suite and act similarly to those already available in Automation Cloud, offering “an elastic way to way to scale up automations automatedly,” UiPath told IT Pro.

“They are different in that they will only scale up as high as the customer has infrastructure for them.”

All the newly announced upgrades to UiPath’s Business Automation Platform will become generally available to all customers on 31 October 2022.