The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has boosted enterprise automation’s influence and power in recent years, allowing us to aim for ever-higher productivity and efficiency. The processes that these automations are enabling have also become more sophisticated over time. With the average major corporation today utilizing over 175 enterprise applications throughout their workflows, investment has flowed into siloed enterprise systems. Data silos and process fragmentation have increased. The operational strain is increased by the fact that many decisions in a workflow are not obvious and that individuals must step in. Lastly, due to their complexity, these procedures cannot be fully automated, optimized, or monitored.
Agentic automation, a new era of automation, offers a fresh way ahead. Even the longest, most complicated processes can be fully automated with agentic automation, which combines humans, robots, AI, and agents. It will produce transformative results throughout the company, empowering businesses to be more independent and productive while improving the experiences of both consumers and employees. It will work seamlessly across diverse systems. While people continue and grow in their positions as leaders, supervisors, and decision makers, agents are increasingly handling the majority of the work.
What Does The Future Of Robotics And Agentics Look Like?
For many years, companies have been aware of and benefited from robotic process automation (RPA). Like humans, robots use screens, systems, and data to carry out work-related tasks. They make predictable decisions, behave predictably, and follow rules. This makes them extremely dependable and effective for repetitive operations like data entry, transaction processing, and reaction triggering that don’t require flexibility or judgment.
A far more recent and developing technology is AI agents. Because they are built on AI models, agents may function without human assistance and get better with time. Although agents come in a wide variety of forms, they are typically goal-oriented and capable of making proactive, probabilistic judgments by utilizing context. Because of this, they work well with robots and are perfect for intricate procedures requiring a great degree of versatility. If you need to book a flight for work, for example, an agent might arrange your entire trip, comparing hotel and airfare costs to get the best bargain before making all of the reservations. Additionally, it could follow corporate guidelines on price, location, and authorized hotels and airlines.
Agents are strong and adaptable, yet they are unable to manage a whole process by themselves. Humans are necessary for agents to oversee, approve, and enhance their work. However, many of the individual, repetitive tasks that comprise long-running enterprise processes also require robots to be completed by agents. Each agent has the tools and capabilities necessary to perform their duties, just like any other employee. Robots are among the most useful tools in the toolkit, along with clever document processing and API connectors! Take the example of booking a flight or hotel: in order to complete the procedure, an agent must “call” on a robot to enter the passenger’s name and payment information.
Agents and robots must cooperate in order to automate lengthy, intricate, and dynamic enterprise processes. The cooperation of the left and right hemispheres of the brain is a helpful (although simple) comparison. Important and logical left-brain functions, such as data collection, entry, and migration, will be performed by robots in the burgeoning autonomous workplace. Agents will undertake creative and dynamic right-brain tasks, such as problem solving, comparison, forecasting, and innovation. Because of their combined talents, agents and robots are a powerful pair that might automate most “work.”
However, this poses a crucial query. What role do people play in the future of robots and agents?
The response is that they continue to maintain strong control.
Robots and agents will be used by humans as tools to increase productivity, and new agentic workflows will be developed as needed. Employees will play a critical role in exception management, stepping in to resolve issues that agents and robots are unable to handle. Human responsibility, empathy, and judgment cannot be duplicated. People are therefore in charge of overseeing, directing, and making final decisions regarding agentic automation.
Controlled Agency: Enterprise Agents
The foundation of agentic automation is agents. However, businesses require enterprise agents they can rely on to perform tasks in a safe, accurate, and dependable manner, not just autonomous agents that are capable of doing so. Our Chief Technology Officer, Raghu Malpani, stated it clearly when he spoke at UiPath FORWARD: “You don’t only want agents. You’re looking for trustworthy agents.
However, creating trusted agents presents a technological problem. There is always a trade-off between autonomy and dependability in every capability. Contrast high-agency but low-reliability agents with highly dependable but low-agency robots. Generally speaking, the more autonomy a capability is granted, the less predictable its results will be. Unpredictability in business operations can be dangerous and expensive.
Thankfully, there exist methods for agentic automation that combine autonomy with dependability. By combining high agency with the dependability we previously attained with our robots, we are creating enterprise-class, first-class agents. From autonomous to trustworthy enterprise agents, we are reversing the trend. We accomplish this by providing clients with the means to track, evaluate, and enhance their agents’ performance as well as by assisting them in comprehending the reasoning and decision-making processes of their agents.
Businesses should give preference to solutions that make it simple for them to test out various models and prompts in order to determine which are the most reliable and efficient. To provide precise and trustworthy business results, make sure these are based on the most up-to-date and pertinent business context and data. In order to continuously monitor an agent’s performance and assess it against real-world datasets, you also require process intelligence skills once it has been deployed.
UiPath’s Ability To Bend The Curve
In agentic automation, “controlled agency” is achieved through the integration of various methods and technologies. Similar to AI, agents require constraints that maintain their outputs within acceptable bounds for the company while allowing them to be creative and problem-solving. As a result, agents do their duties independently and consistently, producing business results you can rely on.
Bringing Everything Together With Agentic Orchestration
However, trusted enterprise agents are only one aspect of agentic automation. It’s about end-to-end, transformative results. To do this, all the elements that make up corporate workflows must effectively collaborate with one another and have complete visibility into how they are interacting. That isn’t always simple, though, because of the intricacy of the processes and the lack of visibility into them.
To smoothly coordinate end-to-end operations involving humans, systems, robots, and AI agents, agentic automation requires an orchestration layer. This calls for a wide range of skills, including automation, agentic AI, process intelligence, and process management. Along with the tools to plan, coordinate, and oversee agentic workflows across systems, agents must be a crucial component of the process management lifecycle.
Why is all of this planning required? Take the processing of vendor invoices, a routine procedure that agentic automation can automate from start to finish. From the mailbox to the enterprise resource planning system, handling a single invoice is a complicated process that requires action, logic, and decision-making at multiple crucial points.
When coordinated properly, humans, agents, and robots can accomplish anything. A higher orchestration layer must oversee and monitor each action, handoff, and integration. The procedure can only be improved and run smoothly after that.
Processing Vendor Invoices Using An Agentic Workflow
The capacity to coordinate agents, robots, humans, and APIs across end-to-end agentic processes is a unique feature of the UiPath PlatformTM. We provide analytics, comprehensive process lifecycle management, and full process instance management. This gives our clients the ability to model, automate, and track intricate business processes from beginning to end. We accomplish all of this on a single platform that is designed to be cross-platform and system-agnostic. UiPath is a pioneer in agentic automation and orchestration because of this.
Controlling The Excitement And Turning It Into A Reality
Innovation in technology is always fascinating. While analysts speculate on the size of the agentic market overall, technology leaders are racing to release the next revolutionary helper or agent. Being the first is one thing, but being prepared to take the lead in agentic automation is quite another.
Companies need enterprise agents they can trust to revolutionize their operations, not standalone autonomous agents. Agents become merely another tool to add to the arsenal in the absence of humans, robots, controlled agency, and best-in-class orchestration. It would be like having a brain without a body to have strong AI models without automation. In a similar vein, agents are useless without the proper resources.