Business automation software company Automation Anywhere Inc. is improving its flagship product with the launch of a new automation success platform.
Announced today at the company’s Imagine event in New York City, it aims to help companies accelerate business transformation by making automation tools available to everyone within the organization. Automation Anywhere, a leader in so-called robotic process automation, recently secured $200 million in new funding. It has established itself by offering products that help companies simplify repetitive business tasks.
The platform works by watching how employees interact with apps — such as manually entering data into a spreadsheet from one app — and creating intelligent bots that can automate those tasks. The idea is that workers have extra time to focus on more challenging problems that robots can’t solve.
The company has created a cloud-native platform that automates interactions with dozens of common business applications, such as Salesforce and Microsoft Office. Employees can also use the platform to create their own automated bots without any coding. Alternatively, users can access a catalog of prepackaged automation workflows for common enterprise use cases.
The updates announced at Imagine 2022, Automation Anywhere’s annual user conference, are all about making these features more accessible. The company says it’s necessary because while most businesses have embraced automation, a recent study by Deloitte Touche Ltd. suggests it’s necessary. shows that only 13% of companies have scaled up their automation efforts.
Perhaps the biggest update released today is AARI for Every App. AARI is a tool introduced last year that enables workers to instruct RPA bots to perform business tasks using natural language commands. With this update, workers can now interact with AARI in almost any type of business application to create bots when they feel like they’re dealing with tedious and repetitive things.
The automated success platform also adds process discovery capabilities from FortressIQ Inc., an artificial intelligence startup the company acquired last year. With these new capabilities, Automation Anywhere can use AI to quickly map and discover new automation opportunities across all systems, tools, and processes used within an organization. These opportunities are then ranked according to their potential return on investment, so companies can quickly determine which tasks and processes should be automated next.
At the same time, new document automation tools can meet expectations, extracting data from any document and transferring it to any application. What’s more, it’s flexible because users can choose from Automation Anywhere’s own pretrained AI models or third-party models, such as Google LLC’s Document AI and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Form Recognizer.
Other updates include a new CoE Manager for business leaders that helps them build, monitor and scale automation through a centralized command center. This way, team leaders can manage everything from idea submission to ROI measurement governance and access control in one place. Finally, the company announced its new Automation Pathfinder program for companies that need help scaling automation. The program provides a framework with best practices, expert services from partners, and more.
International Data Corporation analyst Maureen Fleming. Thumbs up for Automation Anywhere’s new platform, saying businesses urgently need to accelerate digital transformation and automation at scale to save even more time and costs. “Solutions that effectively break down barriers to automation at scale in an agile, secure manner will address these challenges and change the way we work forever,” she said.