Category Archives: Automation

This episode is sponsored by AutoPylot Technologies.

Its a universal complaint: the sales reps dont use the CRM. Its too much effort and takes too much time. As a result, the data in a system like Dynamics 365 Sales is incomplete. CRM may fail to meet expectations, yet the CRM remains the data touchpoint to a range of downstream business processes and decisions.

In this episode, we talk with Steve Shaw of AutoPylot Technologies Corp. about how and why they have entered the Microsoft Dynamics space with a new mobile app for that integrates D365 with added automation and other smart features to encourage sales reps to capture key data. Steve explains why company decided to enter this competitive market and the early results of upcoming research highlighting the impact automation can have on CRM adoption. We also discuss the complementary nature of AutoPylot and Viva Sales, and how conversational AI always starts with conversations.

Show Notes:

To learn how AutoPylot can solve for your biggest CRM frustration, visit http://www.autopylot.com. And they will be at booth 640 at Community Summit North America 2022.

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MSDW Podcast: Why CRM automation will set you, and your reps, free - MSDynamicsWorld

In part two of our interview with HPE, VP and General Manager, Communications Technology Group Tom Craig tells us the number one reason telcos are motivated to adopt AI, ML and automation is to gracefully manage an ageing workforce, and that to stay relevant theyll need more of it.

What are the practical applications of AI making a difference in the telco space right now?

Without question two areas that spring immediately to mind are network operations automation AI and ML will play a very significant part in that journey. Rob Harding from my team Id describe as a world authority and how you use these technologies to drive cost from carrier infrastructures, his technology literacy is way beyond mine but he says were going through different phases of running networks. The analogy would be we used to use maps in the navigation world, then we had online sat nav, then we had live traffic data, then we had automatic routing with live traffic data.

Intent based orchestration, and how we use the IML in the provisioning of services, and the reconfiguration of services and carrier networks is applying those types of logics. How do we describe the intent but not hard code it in policy and scripting to allow suitable levels of AI ML to then configure the network? So in network automation, network management, and orchestration is the first ground that were using AI and ML technologies. And its a big catalyst of how do you run complex networks with less people intensity?

And my measure of success that I always used when I looked at the level of automation is you go and visit a customer operations centre in any carrier and look at the number of yellow post it notes on the service agents screens, and that will tell you where they are in terms of the level of automation. And sometimes you go in and its literally every inch of the screen, and thats because their AI and ML layer is the service agent that depths into a myriad of BSS and OSS systems to try and stitch together a product for the customer.

At one of the operators I worked with in the not too distant past, the provisioning of a VPN connection could be three to six months. And a lot of that was just the manual intensity and overhead of configuration. So I think that its very, very clear that you can drive scales of efficiency in the operators through the use of AI and ML technologies. For that reason its our number one focus area. There are already public figures that look at what the industry has forecasted in efficiency and headcount reductions they have to manage the networks with for the next five years. Whats the physical enabler? In most cases it is going to be a degree of technology driven automation that the industry has never done, and to do that the IML will come in.

There are many other areas such as fraud management HPEs got a very strong position in fraud detection and revenue assurance for carriers, and again its an area that we use AI and ML techniques to very dynamically identify behaviours and threat opportunities for the operator. So theres a number of very practical areas, but those two areas come immediately to mind.

In general, when industries talk about bringing in more AI applications, one of the first things thats brought up is what this means for peoples jobs. It sounds like some of the benefits youre describing are about efficiencies for the telcos if they cant necessarily achieve meteoric growth in what they are already doing, you could become more profitable by being leaner.

its a very its a very good question and its a question that I often ask the customers whats the core driver for automation and using things like AI and ML techniques to drive a level of efficiency? And actually the number one reason theyll say is while the by-product is they know they need to drive a much lower unit cost to serve, operate and build new services the number one motivator is in many cases an ageing workforce demographic.

If you look at the skills and profiles for a lot of people that have been deep into network OSS, network management, network operations, then the motivation is as that experience and the demographic of the workforce ages, how do we make sure we have a replacement technology to cater for the capacity thats left? In the carrier world thats far more the motivation rather than just a blunt weapon. Its much more about how do we gracefully manage an ageing workforce demographic in network operations?

So its not necessarily about significantly less people working in telco in the next 20 years as all this technology comes to fruition?

Yeah and also allowing the top talent to be to be focused on the real key challenges how do you have some of your best talent redeployed on service creation for growth? If youre keeping the fabric running and dimensioned and capacity planned, not many customers are going to pay you additional ARPU for that, but if you can have these people opening up APIs into the edge compute infrastructures for service creation by the application developers that vision, many operators had 15 or 20 years ago. But none have delivered it yet.

This virtualization at the edge creates an opportunity again, the operators have the highest capillarity, potentially lowest latency data centres in the world. Why not open them up to service creation. Now if AI and ML takes the mundane, routine tasks of running the network and allows you to redeploy your top talent on service creation to monetize that edge, Maybe thats a vision which is of far more interest to all

As much as the question about jobs has to be asked, farming was done with handheld ploughs and then that involved more people than it does now so some of this is just is just about technological progress, and the world changes?

It does but you have to go back to basics. You have to live in the commercial reality of the world we live in, and the operators the competitive landscape is different [to what] its ever been. We had the discussion about where did all the value from the investments in 4G go? Now the top seven internet businesses have four times the market cap of the top 78 telcos. In which case, defending the status quo I think we have to say its inarguable that for future viability and competitiveness, the main processes of the carrier has to have a level of automation thats been unseen in the industry to be relevant for future service creation and for future competitiveness. Its unavoidable, you have to have that ability.

MWC last year was awash with banners talking about zero touch operations, very few have practical examples of where theyve done it. Weve been working with Swisscom for a number of years, 90% of their b2b portfolio, which is a growth engine, is fully automated by HP. Their time to market for services, from order to cash has been dropped by 80%. So it can be done, and then you can redeploy people on genuine experience service creation for customers, things that will really matter and they are willing to pay for.

Check out the first part of our interview with VP and General Manager, HPE Communications Technology Group Tom Craig in which he discusses the current state of 5G, Open RAN, and how operators can evolve and grow into new business frontiers.

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Telcos need an unprecedented level of automation to stay relevant - Telecoms.com

This year's Security Awareness Month theme "See Yourself in Cyber" was selected by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to reinforce cybersecurity as a people priority: anchored in partnership, education and individual accountability. This article is part of a series focused on the people considerations of four key pillars of infosec enablement, as noted by CISA's 2022 Awareness campaign: enabling multi-factor authentication, using strong passwords, recognizing and reporting phishing, and updating your software.

Organizational password management goes far beyond setting employee password-creation requirements. It also involves using automated systems whereby privileged accounts may receive higher protections and all accounts are managed by software that can add and remove access as needed.

In the long run, automating employee password management will save time and make your organization more secure.

Employee password-creation requirements are still the basis of organizational password management. While it is still best that employees be required to create passwords that are long, strong and unique, some of the other parameters have changed over the past decade.

Neither Microsoft nor the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) currently recommend "rotating" passwords, i.e. forcing employees to create new passwords periodically.

If you make someone choose a new password every few months, they're going to use a lot of weak passwords instead of a single strong one. New passwords should only be mandated if the old password is phished, forgotten, stolen in a data breach or otherwise compromised.

Both Microsoft and NIST also have dropped the "composition" guidelines that recommended each password be a combination of lower- and upper-case letters, digits and punctuation marks.

Under such rules, many users started with dictionary words and then made obvious substitutions and additions, so that for example, "horsefly" became "h0r53Fly!" Because attackers have precompiled lists of dictionary words and their common variants, the second type of password isn't much more secure than the first kind.

It's better to make longer passwords, even they consist of multiple dictionary words. NIST recommends that organizations allow passwords of up to 64 characters, which would permit the classic "correct horse battery staple" type of passphrase to be easily used.

That's not to say that special characters are out. NIST insists that the entire ASCII character set be accepted as valid password inputs. The government institute recommends that the entire Unicode character set be accepted as well, although the full scope of Unicode characters might be out of the range of some web browsers.

Nor does it mean that passwords will be easier to create. NIST recommends banning single dictionary words, known compromised passwords, repeated characters (like "aaaaaa") and common sequences (such as "abc123"). Passwords also should be at least eight characters long, although much longer passwords are recommended.

NIST and Microsoft both also recommend that multi-factor authentication (MFA) be encouraged or even required. Yet NIST no longer recommends using SMS text messages as a vector for transmitting temporary one-time-use passcodes they're just too easy to compromise.

Not all these recent changes apply to privileged accounts. Those are accounts belonging to system administrators and C-suite executives, as well as to "non-human" accounts found in IT hardware and automated operating-system services. Such accounts have tremendous power over company systems, and their high value as attack targets means that their passwords should still be periodically rotated.

It's often difficult to ascertain how many such privileged accounts exist in an organization. That's why it's essential that an assessment be done to identify them all.

"Privileged accounts, many long forgotten, are sprawled across most IT environments," explains a BeyondTrust white paper. "Different teams may be separately managing if managing at all their own set of credentials, making it difficult to track all the passwords, let alone who has access to them and who uses them."

IT staffers should also be able to see what each privileged account does and what it has access to. But staffers should not be sharing passwords for privileged accounts such as "root" in Unix/Linux systems or "admin" in Windows ones. Instead, each staffer should have their own account.

Cloud computing presents another problem. Hundreds of databases have been exposed online in recent years because Amazon Web Services instances have been misconfigured, so make sure your company's cloud accounts are properly set up.

"Even for those organizations that have implemented some degree of automation for their password management," says BeyondTrust, "if not architected with the cloud in mind, there's no guarantee a password-management solution will be able to adequately manage cloud credentials."

That's not to say that enterprise password managers can't be very capable. Unlike consumer-grade password managers intended for a single user, enterprise password managers can do much more than just save passwords in an encrypted vault.

Some of them can implement organizational password-creation policies, onboard new users and deprovision departing employees. They may also be able to log user activity, control access to company systems from employee-owned devices and limit failed login attempts.

But to really give a larger organization comprehensive control over password use, you'll want to consider a privileged-access-management (PAM) solution. Unlike password managers, these will manage password and access by non-human entities in systems and networks and will generally be better at managing privileged accounts.

PAMs can also deploy and manage MFA solutions, discover forgotten privileged accounts, provide audit-ready full logs of user access for regulatory compliance, and rotate passwords if necessary including all user passwords simultaneously. Changes will emanate from a centralized hub out to users instead of being implemented piecemeal by users.

The downside is that PAMs can be more expensive to license, deploy and maintain than enterprise password managers. They are a subset of identity and access management (IAM) systems, which control employee access to systems across an entire organization.

"IAM strategies dictate how to manage general access to resources such as devices, applications, network files, and environments," explains a blog post by StrongDM. "Privileged access management (PAM) is a subset of IAM focused on privileged users those with the authority to make changes to a network, device, or application."

Which type of solution to choose depends on the size and budget of your organization. Small and medium-sized organizations might be satisfied with an enterprise password manager that allows for some centralized management of user access. But larger firms will want to consider a PAM solution for its privileged users as well as an IAM one for all the rest.

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Password management: Policy and automation tactics | SC Media - SC Media

Preparedness is a game-changer whenever uncertainty strikes.The County of Los Angeles faced such uncertainly when the pandemic hit and it had to quickly become more nimble and look at things differently.

Automation helped fill the void, especially in the Countys healthcare sector, according to David Cardenas (pictured), deputy director of operations at the County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health.

Were 10 million people with, you know,hundreds of square miles inside of LA, he stated. The holy grail for us in healthcare has always been,at least on the public health side, to try to see how can we tap in more activelyso that when you go see the doctoror when you go to the hospital,you can get access to that informationvery quickly.Our focus for all our technology implementations is around how to gather that informationmore quickly and put that into actionso we can do quick interventions.

Cardenas spoke with theCUBE industry analystsDave VellanteandDavid NicholsonatUiPath Forward, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Medias livestreaming studio. They discussed how the pandemic necessitated automation within the County of Los Angeles for heightened public health.(* Disclosure below.)

Exhaustion in organizations coupled with uncertainties like the pandemic has accelerated the automation narrative. And the County has worked with UiPath to strengthen its technology in this area. As a result, the County of LA has created a better foundation to continuing moving in the right direction, according to Cardenas.

How do we now make the changes that we madein response to the pandemic permanentso that the next time this comes we wont have to be struggling, he said. If were not prepared for that,were not going to be able to respond and preserve the health and safety of our citizens.

Based on the anthrax and bioterrorism attacks that emerged after 9/11, Cardenas believes more funding was channeled toward public health because it was under the lens. And, now, this sector is being revamped in the post-pandemic era.

We had a huge infusion of funding; a lot of support from stakeholders,both politically and within the healthcare system, he pointed out. We were able to make some large stepsin movement at that point.This feels the same but in a larger scale, because now it touched every part of the infrastructure.

The County is riding on the wave of pandemic-induced solutions, which has been instrumental in eliminating friction in healthcare, according to Cardenas.

The healthcare system in LA was working very closely with usto make sure that we were responding, he said. There is that wave that we are tryingto make sure that we use this as an opportunityto kind of ride it so that we canimplement all the things that we want.

By using cutting-edge technologies like automation, Cardenas believes the County of Los Angeles is able to pinpoint disease outbreaks, adding that this has made the public health sector more efficient.

There are places where we can see specific targets, but the datas a little staleand we find out several months after, he said. Technologys going to be our pathto be able to capture that information more actively. So I can see and surveil my entire county in my jurisdiction and know,oh, theres an outbreak of disease happeningin this section of the county.

Heres the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLEs and theCUBEs coverage of theUiPath Forwardevent:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the UiPath Forward event. Neither UiPath Inc., the sponsor for theCUBEs event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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County of Los Angeles deploys automation for quicker healthcare interventions - SiliconANGLE News

The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) is providing $6.5 million in research funding to support bus automation projects that will improve transit system safety and efficiency.

Some bus automation projects include avoiding collisions with pedestrians, improved braking, and precision movement for bus fueling, charging and maintenance, the agency said in astatement.

The FTA is making $5 million available forAdvanced Driver Assistance Systemsfor to improve bus operator safety and efficiency. Another $1.5 million is available for automated transit bus maintenance to improve efficiency and safety in bus support facilities.

FTA will look at potential impacts on the workforce resulting from applications submitted through this funding opportunity as part of its commitmentto helping transit workers prepare for technological industry advancements.

As described in the agencys Strategic Transit Automation Research orSTAR Plan, the FTA said it will continue to explore the use of automation technologies in bus systems.

The agency is also funding several demonstration projects in real-world settings to determine potential benefits, costs, and other impacts of automation and is providing transit agencies with resources, guidance, and tools to make informed decisions as they consider deploying transit buses with automated features.

Research priorities will include exploring how new technology can improve safety by reducing collisions caused by human error, both by bus drivers and other people on the road, the FTA said.

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Source: Federal Transit Administration

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The Federal Transit Administration is Supporting Bus Automation Testing - Roads & Bridges

The contentious situation we are now facing at California ports, and ports all over North America, has been brewing for some time, pre-dating the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example, the workers at another major North American port in Montreal, Canada, have walked off the job twice in the past two years. The last time it happened, the government had to force workers to return by way of back-to-work legislation.

The Montreal port workers' dispute dates back to 2018 and the inability of the union to negotiate a new contract with management. In this case, the points of contention were shift work and concerns with work-life balance, as longshore and maintenance workers would typically work 19 days in a row before having two days off.

Before 2022, the last "contract-related disruption"affecting west coast ports was in 2014. Because "contentious negotiations" between the two parties required intervention from the Secretaries of Labor and Commerce, there wasn't a resolution until 2015.

Given this history of tense and acrimonious negotiations, rather than negotiating a new contract in 2017, both parties agreed to extend the existing contract to July 1st, 2022.In short, the chickens of 2017 have now come home to roost.

While wages were, and continue to be, at the center of this recent port crisis, there is another perhaps more significant looming threat to port workers' peace of mind going back to 2002 automation.

According to a recent Bloomberg article, a "key sticking point in the negotiations" has been ship owners' and port authorities' proposals to upgrade their use of technology. Fueling managements angst and elevating their sense of urgency regarding the need for automation was the impact of the pandemic. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), besides worker shortages, ports have had to adjust to the reality of lower volumes, the implementation of occupational health and safety measures for dockers and shore personnel, and the adoption of teleworking and remote operations for office workers.

In this context, the 2021 World Bank's Container Port Performance Index ranked the California ports at Long Beach and Los Angeles last at 369 and 370, respectively. Automation is the answer to many of the bottleneck and inefficiency problems the ports are experiencing. However, many worry that automation will cost people their jobs.

Once again, the disruption of supply chains caused by the above-stated port inefficiencies pre-dates the pandemic. Obviously, the pandemic has elevated the situation to a new crisis level but make no mistake; it was the proverbial ticking time bomb in which it was not a matter of if, but when the effects of the disruption from within would reverberate throughout the entire supply chain world.

The August 21,2020 TechTarget articlelists "15 examples of supply chain disruptions throughout history, as unforeseen supply insufficiencies, natural disasters, civil unrest and even traffic jams make supply chain disruptions a fact of life. The 1973 Johnny Carson toilet paper shortage scare is an example that a global pandemic isnt the only thing that can trigger panic buying.

The article then says that "smart companies focus on being proactive, creating business continuity plans and learning from past mistakes. How can companies be proactive and create effective business continuity plans when facing the challenges of internal disruptions?

As a Bloomberg article reports, despite concerns that bottlenecks associated with inefficiencies at the ports are aggravating product shortages and inflation nationwide, the unions are steadfastly against automation, maintaining that it will eliminate jobs. Without technology, how can organizations be "proactive" and create "effective business continuity plans?" On the other side of this question, how can organizations address the inevitable external disruptions of their global supply chains without enterprise-wide buy-in internally?

It's possible that we spend too much time looking myopically outward while, to a certain extent, overlooking the disruption within people.

You have likely heard the term disruptive innovation. For many people, it implies the introduction of new technologies that revolutionize the way we do things by making processes easier.

However, disruptive innovation is not the same as disruptive technology. It is more than just the introduction of technology; it refers to using technology to change how we work, radically. One example of leveraging disruptive technology is Amazons launch as an online bookstore in the 1990s.

That said, disruptive technology alone will not, by itself, disrupt how we work and do business. Disruptive innovation requires people.

When it comes to the contention between management and port workers, addressing the latter's fears regarding job loss is the real supply chain disruption for which we have to find a solution. Until we do that, we will likely be having this same discussion with the next global crisis.

Read more:

Why West Coast Port Workers are Fighting for Less Automation and More Pay - Supply and Demand Chain Executive

Royal Mail has unveiled its first new large parcel conveyor in Gatwick Mail Centre to support the automation and customer tracking of larger parcels in the network. The conveyor is capable of processing bulky parcels weighing up to 30kg offering improved tracking information to customers.

Designed to process around 3,000 large parcels per hour, the machine is fitted with a dimension, weight and scanner system designed to handle bulkier items. This provides Royal Mail with a rich source of more accurate data that enables managers to more efficiently pack and route collection vehicles, thereby helping to reduce operational carbon emissions.

The new conveyors also support improved customer tracking for larger parcels as customers send higher volumes of larger parcels, and want more information on their items progress from posting to delivery.

The conveyors handle parcels classed as Format 3 & 4 which are items measuring a maximum of 610x460x460 and up to 30kg in weight. This is about the equivalent in size to a parcel containing a microwave oven.

The second large parcel conveyor will launch soon in Royal Mails South Midlands Mail Centre with the potential for additional launches in mail centres across the UK in the future. Gatwick and South Midlands have been chosen because they are the mail centres which process the most oversized parcels in the Royal Mail network.

The new conveyor directly supports Royal Mails transformation into more of a parcels-led business to meet the changing demands of its customers.

Royal Mail is pursuing an ambitious programme of automation. In March 2022, it reached the milestone of 50% parcels automated up from 33%the previousyear. The business is aiming to reach its overall target of 90% parcel automation by 2023-24.

In June, Royal Mail opened its huge new North West Super Hub in Warrington which can process more than 800,000 parcels a day. Its Midlands Super Hub, based in Daventry, is on track to open in Summer 2023 and when operational, will be able to process more than one million items per day.

Grant McPherson, Chief Operating Officer at Royal Mail, said:We are working hard to transform the Royal Mail operation to process all parcels more efficiently so that we can deliver an even better experience for our customers.By investing in machines that can process bulkier and heavier parcels, we are putting in place the building blocks for higher levels of customer tracking and transparency. This new large parcel conveyor is just another example of how we are investing in reinventing Royal Mail for the future.

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Royal Mail invests in automation at Gatwick Mail Centre - Post and Parcel

Today, companies across the world are facing unprecedented uncertainty. Consequences of the global pandemic, ongoing trade concerns and political conflicts have disrupted business operations, which has, in turn, exacerbated existing workforce issues, created supply shortages, and made demand forecasting and customer engagements more complex. How are businesses expected to thrive in this world order? According to a new report, the answer lies in the power of automation to stabilize workforces, drive economic growth, and build business resilience. Introducing the Automation Economy.

The Automation Economythe focus this week at Imagine, and in response to Automation Anywheres third edition of the Automation Now & Next reportwill accelerate how businesses scale automation and sustain performance. Of the 1,000 global organizations surveyed in the report, more than a third indicated automation will lead them out of global crises.

Todays business leaders must look beyond their current business processes and imagine how automation can enable them, and others, to make bolder moves and reimagine work, says Mihir Shukla, CEO and co-founder of Automation Anywhere. The reality is we just dont have enough knowledge workers to do the work, and theres much more work to be done. It doesnt matter what you produce, but more importantly, how you are going to get the work completed and deliver the product to your customers?

A fireside chat with Automation Anywhere youtu.be

For certain sectors, intelligent automation is a must-have, not just a nice-to-have. In financial services, automated processes can include loan payment management, car loan applications, bank account management and much more. In a case study published by Automation Anywhere, one data firm needed data to be converted from one system to another. The projected time for a vendor to finish this process was two years, but the migration was completed in just 12 weeks with automation and bots running 24/7.

In healthcare, automation can improve patient outcomes by supporting medical advancements, managing patient intake, scheduling, claims and billing, freeing staff to ensure patients get the care they need. In retail, automation services can make ERP and supply chain processes more-efficient, and can include creating and disseminating reports, clearing invoices, and checking payment status against service-level agreements (SLAs).

The C-suite views automation as a vital tool in the business toolbox that can revitalize their workforce and improve employee retention. After all, if workers dont have to focus on routine manual tasks, they can be more engaged with other aspects of their job. In the Automation Anywhere report, around 40% of survey respondents believed that more than half of all employees could benefit from even just a single bot to help them in their daily work routine.

Also, a whopping 94% of respondents said moving employees to higher-value work is a top priority for the coming year.

For nearly twenty years, according to Shukla, he has been on a mission to unleash human potential by helping every company in every sector across the globe build a digital workforce and succeed with automation.

Teaming up with a digital coworker is par for the course for businesses seeking to address key challenges, but it is also useful as a strategy to interest employees with a new kind of colleague. At Automation Anywhere, they are using hundreds of digital coworkers internally in multiple departments. Our employees aren't just more productive with bots they are happier, says Shukla. Employees and customers have quickly come to not only rely on their digital workers but to engage with them, giving them friendly nicknames and wanting to communicate with them in a more personal way.

Shukla goes on to say that Automation Anywhere is delivering on that promise for customers. When we empower human workers to offload manual tasks to automation, we unleash their potential to pivot to the next big idea, build deeper customer relationships and drive business growth.

That is a future many business leaders are embracing to attain a competitive advantage.. A quarter of respondents in the Automation Anywhere report said they are escalating automation funding by at least 25% to help speed up automation deployments. Sitting on their hands simply isnt an option any longer, especially as more companies focus diligently on building a resilient workforce buttressed by both human and digital workers.

Digital transformation continues to accelerate at a rapid pace across enterprise businesses, and it can be overwhelming to adapt to an ever-evolving culture of technological change. But to drive growth, embracing the Automation Economy can be a harbinger of positive outcomes ahead. Business leaders can continue to help run current operations with the status quo model, or they can choose the bold and rewarding path of making calculated bets and exploring new technologies and solutions to scale automation across the company.

More here:

Welcome to the automation economy - Protocol

Navigating the corridors of (digitally automated) business.

Automation accelerates. As a core fundamental truth that has pervaded through the three (some say four) industrial revolutions, every time we have succeeded in applying automation at one level or another, we have generally been able to execute some function or process at an accelerated rate.

Today we understand automation to exist not just in factory machines, industrial equipment engineering and pre-programmed devices; we also understand software automation to be the intelligence required to execute defined, specific repeatable tasks inside business processes and human workflow models.

But automation needs to be smart. As they say, garbage in - garbage out. Simply speeding up inefficient systems means we do more stuff badly, more quickly. Applying software automation in the form of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) that enables us to create autonomous self-running and even self-healing systems only happens effectively if we bring automation engineering close to an organizations tactical operations stream.

Now that we're past the basics and looking for more sophisticated levels of advancement in this space, enterprise automation software company UiPath has now explained how it is bringing more business-centricity to how its platform can be used by software developers. Put simply, UiPath has crated what it calls developer-friendly automation innovations that put the power of automation behind more business processes.

The UiPath Business Automation Platform provides the foundation every enterprise needs to develop new apps and automate existing ones. Whether the desired business outcome is acceleration of profitable growth, cost savings, or improved employee and customer experiences, UiPath makes it easy to transform more processes into digital, automated workflows, said Ted Kummert, executive vice president, products & engineering at UiPath.

Marketing-driven VP statements and corporate backslapping notwithstanding then, what is the company actually doing and how do these software tools actually work?

For developers, theres UiPath Studio Web, a browser-based automation development tool designed to automation creation available to cross-platform users and makes it easier to distribute automation at scale in an organization.

The important words there are of course cross-platform & at-scale.

In order to enable software automations to work more broadly cross-platform (i.e. core operating systems from Windows to Mac OS X and Linux, but also Apple iOS, Android and specialised platforms that might be deployed at the edge in the Internet of Things), UiPath will have had to shoulder some meaty background engineering to serve the nuances, syntax, format and software dependencies needed for different platform deployments. To enable scale, UiPath will have engaged in similarly meaty (tofu and meat-free substitutes are also available) background engineering to provision for bigger data volumes, use of wider disparate cloud instances and so on.

This release of the UiPath platform also includes new capabilities to simplify the creation of public-facing processes and apps for customer service and value chain scenarios to streamline customer experiences. In other words, extended work to accommodate for more intuitive user interactions, based upon the ability to shape software automation to work in a way that makes people and processes happy.

In addition, UiPath offers a connection builder to simplify Application Programming Interface (API) connection to both in-house applications and specialized industry solutions and expand the automations and apps developers can build.

The company is also talking about a concept that it calls continuous discovery. This is designed to help users discover the as-is state of processes and tasks, take action to optimize them and to then continuously monitor them for ongoing improvement to achieve desired business outcomes.

Specifically, software upgrades here include UiPath Automation Hub with ROI to enable comparisons between estimated benefits and actual outcomes, enabling users to learn from successes and replicate them. There is also process mining with high scalability, improved performance and new analytics for better process insights. Additionally, lets also mention Assisted Task Mining, a service engineered to provide process improvement leaders with the ability to capture and document not only the common way a process is completed but also the natural variations that occur in the real world.

Our new features allow customers to automate an increasing number of business processes. In this release, the acquisition of Re:infer adds Communications Mining to the platform to unlock the value of the massive amounts of communications data generated by a business each day. Organizations can analyze emails, documents, chat logs, social messages, and more to create actionable business data and new opportunities for automation, notes the team, in a statement issued in line with the companys annual user event, known as UiPath Forward.

At its core (and as we have hopefully illustrated by now) automation is all about understanding. Its about creating software that can ingest, decompose and define elements of human workflows in the form of data in various shapes and forms and then be able to create digital structures around the higher-level tasks being carried out.

This truth is why we use terms like Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in the field of speech recognition and its why UiPath talks about its approach to Document Understanding (DU). New native support in Document Understanding for bank and financial statements and common supply chain documents (like packing lists) broadens the automation use cases that UiPath is now aiming to serve. Additionally, moving slightly sidewards from understanding to visual comprehension, AI Computer Vision has been now upgraded in UiPath to read new types of dynamic screen content, such as scrolling tables on the web and in apps.

Finally, for now, UiPath says its Automation Cloud is now supported for delayed enterprise releases that allow for more testing time and site-to-site VPN support in Automation Cloud Robots to allow robots to automate systems and data that reside in private clouds.

As we now increasingly adopt these types of software automations and business accelerators, what may make a difference most in this space is how quickly we can summon these [software] robots to work for us when a human working team defines and details a need for any given task.

That means not just software robots, but serverless software robots i.e. serverless (as we have explained before here) being systems that do have a server, but have enough back-end cloud-based girth not to have to detail the size or shape of that virtualized server base service right until it is needed.

The company thinks it has this aspect covered too. For customers that self-host, UiPath Automation Suite includes new updates for process mining and serverless robots, plus new enterprise capabilities such as Active-Active High Availability/Disaster Recovery support and lower resource requirements.

Software automation was already smart. By nature, it had to be. But if software automation has progressed here, then it sounds like it may have spent an extra year in business school.

Read more:

UiPath Steers Automation Closer To Business Processes - Forbes

Dive Brief:

Executives across industries are turning to automation to deliver on cost optimization and enhanced productivity objectives, Saikat Ray, VP analyst at Gartner, told CIO Dive in August. The robotic process automation software market will reach $2.9 billion by the end of 2022, up 19.5% from 2021, according to Gartner.

In recent years, large UiPath bank customers have been using automation tools to facilitate initiatives that include data extraction and data transfer efforts to support the merger of BB&T and SunTrust; reduction of manual work for Wells Fargo contact center agents through digital personal assistants; and the delegation of some structured, rule-based repetitive tasks to bots at JPMorgan Chase.

From JPMorgan Chases perspective, one of the next steps on its automation journey will include using bots to tackle more sophisticated tasks, including delving into unstructured processes and unstructured data, and using machine learning to facilitate these efforts, said Shefali Shah, managing director of global digital transformation and integrated intelligent automation at JPMorgan Chase.

Diana Caplinger, executive vice president and head of enterprise enablement and intelligent automation at Truist, said the company is deploying automation in support of integrated relationship management, an effort to use data across the organization to deliver more personalized service to clients.

Meanwhile, UiPath, through its acquisition of U.K.-based artificial intelligence startup Re:infer in August, will add a natural-language processing capability that can mine data from customer conversations taking place over email, chat or voice interactions. The toolset will be available for clients to use early next year, according to Ted Kummert, executive vice president for products and engineering at UiPath.

For banks, its imperative to move beyond back-office use cases and increasingly connect automation to customer experience improvements and competitive differentiation in the marketplace, argued Forresters Clarke.

Financial services firms need to leverage automation to enhance and create new experiences across the customer lifecycle, she said.

Read more:

Banks turn to automation to realize efficiency gains - Banking Dive