Robotic Process Automation + AI @ UiPathForward Americas 2018

Here are the highlights of my presentation at the UiPath Forward event -

This is a very exciting time for Uipath because we have a huge opportunity in applying AI to process automation. AI has needed a last mile vehicle for it to be effective and we believe RPA is that perfect vehicle. AI models need to deliver insights at the right time to the right people in a business process. Then these insights need to be tracked for usage and effectiveness to close the feedback loop and build a true AI self-learning system. RPA is perfect connective tissue for this. Technically the supervision signal for training deep learning models comes in high fidelity in an RPA enabled front end system than a backend data integration system. At UiPath, we are investing in four major areas for AI.

#1 Visual understanding - We want to make our robots as smart as humans in understanding what's on a screen. Take any enterprise application like CRM, ERP, HR or finance systems. We will be able to understand all the visual elements like buttons, boxes labels and tables. We will use state of the art computer vision techniques to give these visual smarts to our robots.

#2 Document and Data understanding - Most of the world's information is locked up in unstructured or structured data entities like scanned documents, receipts, POs , invoices, emails etc. We will unlock this information by building extraction and classification models based on supervised learning. We will also use rule based and unsupervised learning for doing this.

#3 Conversational understanding - As our robots become more pervasive, they should have the capability to interact with our users using natural user interfaces like voice and text. Our customers will be able to invoke robots or enter data using Google home and Alexa devices. Customers of our contact center customers will be able to kick off automation simply using voice and text chat.

#4 Process Understanding - Last but not the least we are a Process automation company. We will make it easier to build our robots and our robots will have the capability to gracefully handle failures, self-heal and self-generate. Our robots will be able to identify new automatable workflows and automate the automation or what we call meta automation.

At UiPath, we are really excited to work with an amazing set of customers and partners to make our platform the next-generation intelligent process automation platform.