UiPath updates: cloud-based robots and AI-model training for citizen developers

Cloud-based robots that can be launched without infrastructure provisioning and artificial intelligence (AI) model training are two new initiatives UiPath rolled out in its most recent update today.

The ability to spin up robots in the cloud without having to manually provision the infrastructure was a main talking point as the updates were outlined in an episode of UiPath Live, the automation provider’s streaming program that featured Chief Product Officer Param Kahlon.

The update means banks looking to expand and scale their automations may do so without worrying about the supporting infrastructure or managing how to provision the automations, Kahlon said.

In fact, UiPath showed in a demo today how automation cloud robots can be created on a virtual machine, connected to a virtual private network (VPN) and run almost any job that a self-hosted, unattended robot runs.

AI support

The new release also includes simplified support for leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) when extracting documents form data — a use case for robotic process automation (RPA) that became popular during the rollout of the Payroll Protection Program (PPP). The tool, called “Forms AI,” enables an AI model to be trained with between two and five sample documents and deployed by citizen developers.

“Any business analyst, any citizen developer can leverage AI and deep learning ML (machine learning) models to leverage and extract information from documents,” Kahlon said.

The demo showed how, with two sample documents and a few clicks, a model could be published and used to create an automation that can extract information from a document without coding or AI skills.

Among the other updates highlighted from this release cycle were:

• More support for automations on Macs;
• A new framework for attended automations;
• Support for automation centers of excellence (CoE), including support for scaling automations to end users; and
• Security and governance features, such as role- and compliance-based access control for features deployed both in the cloud and on-premise.

While the company issues updates every two weeks on its cloud platform, on-premises releases are biannual, in April and October. “Like every release, this release also has hundreds of capabilities that span the entire lifecycle of automation,” Kahlon said. “All of our features and capabilities that we release to our customers are the same codebase, whether you deploy it in the cloud or on-prem.”

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