By Daniel Dines, founder and CEO, UiPath, a leading enterprise automation and AI software company.
Since I founded UiPath two decades ago, our goal has been to provide a robot to every person. There are countless routine tasks in every job that stifle creativity, innovation, and productivity; we want to unleash people from the work that limits their potential.
With the evolution in AI in the last few years, I’ve realized robots alone aren’t the answer. We are now entering a new era that will bring our vision to life: the age of agents.
Defining the agentic era
While generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) can be incredibly useful for executing tasks like content development or powering chat functions, they lack an understanding of workplace processes happening millions of times each day in every business; actions like credit risk assessment, general ledger coding and approval, and appointment referrals and scheduling. Without the context and memory of these end-to-end business processes, GenAI technologies alone can’t provide employees with the actionable intelligence they need to be successful.
This is where agentic AI breaks new ground. An AI agent is an autonomous, intelligent software entity that perceives its environment, processes information, and makes informed decisions. AI agents can operate autonomously or semi-autonomously and are designed to mimic human decision-making or problem-solving processes in a given domain. Teams can build their own agents, leverage existing agents trained in specific industries or processes, or use some
combination of the two.
Agents learn and improve with every interaction. They work alongside humans and automations to perform specific steps of the business process: Robots are best for rule-based tasks; agents for unstructured information processing and decision making; and humans for validating agents’ recommendations.
Ensuring enterprise governance of agents
Though there is incredible value in AI agents, their autonomy creates concerns around trust. Some agentic AI solutions are opaque, making it difficult for users to understand the complex reasoning and decision making behind the technology. And, as enterprises deploy agents into and between their existing workflows and applications, business leaders need to be confident they aren’t opening themselves up to increased threats such as misuse, data breaches, or cyberattacks.
As AI systems become more autonomous, ensuring their responsible and ethical use is paramount. Enterprises must strike a balance between autonomy and human oversight to prevent unintended consequences and guarantee that AI-driven actions align with ethical, compliance, and legal standards. This is where automation remains critical to delivering orchestration, governance, and value with agentic AI.
Introducing agentic automation
Agentic automation provides AI with the enterprise context to intelligently plan and synchronize actions across robots, agents, people, and systems to understand, improve, and automate all kinds of workflows — from the mundane and predictable to the complex and dynamic. It maintains humans in the loop — meaning agents are intentionally limited in their ability to take certain actions that would require worker intervention (for example, approving a home loan). As a result, agentic automation unlocks the full potential of the agentic era by addressing concerns with AI agents, including the need to handle variable workflows; support autonomous decision making; and ensure trusted applications.
With a single point of access and orchestration for robots, agents, and humans, agentic automation offers full enterprise oversight to ensure compliance and accuracy, maintain privacy and security, and reduce the risk of unethical or unchecked AI use. It also maintains seamless connectivity with existing enterprise systems like CRMs and ERPs to reduce disruption while accelerating innovation.
The most powerful use cases for agents will be those that can orchestrate across business systems. End-to-end processes almost always involve multiple systems, applications, and technologies. Therefore, orchestration capabilities should be cross-enterprise and agnostic. Serving as the nerve center, an agentic automation platform meticulously coordinates workflows involving humans, robots, and agents and harmonizes all elements within an automation ecosystem. It functions as the conductor in the grand symphony of business processes, orchestrating the roles of robots, agents, and humans in end-to-end implementation. It ensures that humans, robots, and AI agents collaborate seamlessly.
Working alongside people and AI, agentic automation has the power to completely revolutionize industries. In insurance, an AI agent can instantly assess the validity of a claim, gather necessary information from various sources, and even knowledgably and empathetically communicate with the customer while accelerating the claims process. In healthcare, it can empower healthcare workers by autonomously analyzing complex data streams, monitoring patient information in real-time, and providing tailored treatment plans based on patient data. The possibilities are endless — and no process or workflow is too complex.
Agentic AI can untether enterprises and their workforces from processes that curb innovation and productivity, but only if it is properly governed and orchestrated. With agentic automation, that promise can be realized. The ultimate business outcome — bring automation to many more complex workflows with potential savings in the trillions of dollars.
Learn more about how to accelerate human achievement with agentic AI and agentic automation here.
This post was created by UiPath with Insider Studios.
