Automation Anywhere Releases New AI + Automation Enterprise System Helping Companies to Drive 10x Business Impact With AI Agents

⇨ Automation Anywhere launched its AI + Automation Enterprise System in mid-2024, integrating AI with automation to significantly enhance efficiency and drive enterprise transformation, achieving up to 3x time to value and 10x business impact across various business workflows.

⇨ The introduction of AI Agents and the AI Agent Studio allows organizations to create custom agents that can learn from enterprise data, automate complex cognitive tasks, and improve deployment speed by up to 90%, thereby increasing return on investment and operational efficiency.

⇨ Research indicates a growing importance of process automation among companies, rising from 40% to 54% in the perception of its significance between 2023 and 2024, as businesses seek to enhance productivity, reduce manual touchpoints, and improve profitability.

Longstanding SAP partner, Automation Anywhere, an established provider of AI-powered automation solutions, announced in mid-2024 its new AI + Automation Enterprise System that puts AI to work with automation to drive ambitious outcomes for its customers. The company’s offering is infused with its second-generation GenAI Process Models to speed up discovery, development and deployment of AI process automations. The company also launched new AI Agents to manage complex cognitive tasks and increase automation across every system in an enterprise. These solutions will help organizations achieve efficiency improvements, driving process tasks that formerly took hours down to minutes, and delivering 3x time to value and up to 10x business impact across business workflows that include customer service operations, finance, IT and HR.

Intelligent process automation refers to a blend of advanced technologies—Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and sometimes Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—to automate complex business processes. Unlike traditional automation, which handles only rule-based, repetitive tasks, intelligent process automation can analyze data, recognize patterns, and make decisions in real-time, leading to a more dynamic and adaptive automation system.

Recent SAPinsider research shows that companies are placing greater importance on process automation. The research report Process Productivity and Efficiency Through Process Automation and Intelligence 2024 uncovered that the perception of process automation as “Extremely Important” has notably increased, jumping from 40% in 2023 to 54% in 2024. This is in keeping with related research that shows companies striving for greater productivity, better expense control, fewer manual touchpoints, and improved profitability in an increasingly global marketplace.

“Every enterprise today is facing the same inescapable growth and productivity mandate to work smarter, not harder — to be more productive, more efficient, and more innovative,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO and Co-Founder, Automation Anywhere. “Automation is the foundation that’s gotten us partway there. But AI Agent-powered automation is the breakthrough that will take us beyond — to automate the seemingly impossible, create a new operating model for business, and drive enterprise transformation with stunning results.”

Vale, a Brazilian multinational corporation engaged in metals and mining and one of the largest logistics operators in Brazil, is the largest producer of iron ore and nickel in the world, and it is among Automation Anywhere’s customers that have benefited from the continuous intelligent process automation advancements Automation Anywhere has been driving since 2003.

Vale needed to improve efficiencies—fast. A significant increase in purchase volume was forecasted that would overload the team if operations weren’t streamlined ASAP. Vale used Automation Anywhere’s AI-powered Process Discovery to rapidly identify areas to optimize. Advanced computer vision and AI monitored employees’ actions, recording and analyzing more than 370,000 events to uncover how processes work across people, systems, and data. Based on this complete picture painted by Automation Anywhere, generative AI pinpointed five key processes for automation that would have a major impact. This gave Vale the momentum it needed to fast-track its next automation initiative.

Thanks to Automation Anywhere and the power of AI, Vale was able to discover, prioritize, and automate at the high speed that circumstances demanded. In fact, the discovery process was 89% faster than previous efforts using Automation Anywhere’s AI-powered Process Discovery. The five high-impact automations identified and implemented helped Vale get ahead of the purchase surge, saving more than 121,000 hours of labor and US$5 million per year.

“Our discovery process typically took about 3 months. Now with Automation Anywhere’s Process Discovery, it’s just 10 days—and the AI process agent never forgets anything because it records everything. It’s very detailed,” said Alexandre Pigatti, Head of Artificial Intelligence and Data Democratization at Vale.

A new feature from Automation Anywhere’s Enterprise System is the ability to build custom AI Agents with the new AI Agent Studio. AI Agents augment automation with the ability to learn from enterprise data, make informed decisions, and take action responsibly across any enterprise system, speeding processes by up to 90 percent. AI Agent Studio features low-code tools, making it easy for developers of all skill levels to quickly create specialized AI Agents to help with their specific use cases – no data scientist required. These AI Agents combine AI and action to tackle more complex cognitive work, like identifying and automatically replacing a product in the case of a stock shortage. They are adaptive, capable of learning from complex enterprise data, and able to take swift action for quick resolution and higher ROI.

Enterprise AI Agent highlights include the following:

• New AI Agent Studio, generally available, provides developers of all levels with low-code tools to easily build, manage, and govern custom AI Agents. Developers can start with the foundational model of choice, including models from AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and more.

• Developers are now able to augment AI Agents with enterprise knowledge through a native Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) service, and Amazon Bedrock as of October 2024. Finally, developers will have built-in prompt testing to ensure outputs are relevant for any use case before putting AI Agents into action.

• Enhanced Security & Governance equips AI Agents with built-in controls for the protection and monitoring of how AI and company data is being used to ensure security and compliance. New functionality includes monitoring and audit of agent and model performance, guardrails for consistent use, and human-validation and prompt testing to limit hallucinations and maximize quality of outputs. Future Data Masking will automatically redact sensitive data from any input getting processed by a model.

“AI Agent Studio has truly streamlined my workflow, boosted my productivity, and has been a game-changer,” said Khaled Mostafa, Intelligent Automation Services Delivery Manager, Magnoos Information Systems. “The ability to seamlessly switch between foundational models from leading vendors within a single platform has significantly enhanced my prompt engineering process. Governance is critical and the features are incredibly robust, offering detailed insights into all our interactions with these models which makes me much more comfortable including GenAI capabilities in my automations.”

The underlying engines that power the AI + Automation Enterprise System are Automation Anywhere’s GenAI Process Models. The GenAI Process Models 2.0 are exclusively designed to drive faster process discovery, 30 percent faster automation creation, 90 percent accuracy with document processing, and 50 percent more automation resiliency – above and beyond what LLMs alone can deliver. The models are tuned with rich metadata from more than 300 million process automations running on Automation Anywhere’s cloud-native platform.

A new set of developer automation solutions built on the new GenAI Process Models 2.0 include the following:

• New Automator AI, generally available, a comprehensive set of generative AI products and capabilities to accelerate the automation lifecycle, making it faster and easier to build, deploy and manage automations. Features include:

• • Generative Recorder, enabling teams to build more resilient UI automations with a generative AI fallback that automatically detects changes in a source application interface and self-heals in real-time to keep work moving, reducing automation downtime by up to 50 percent.

• • Enhanced Autopilot, generally available, enables cross-functional teams to go from discovery to automation in record time by quickly converting process documentation into draft process automation using generative AI. Autopilot now allows for inputs from any mining tool in BPMN format to build automation.

• Document Automation, which has seen tremendous customer response and 9x customer growth year on year, leverages generative AI enhancements for real-time processing of any document type, including unstructured documents and achieves more than 90 percent accuracy. Companies now can rapidly capture data in the flow of work from any document type with the new ability to extract data from complex tables, more than 30 supported languages, and expanded model options. Model setup and deployment is faster and easier than ever with a new testing and setup experience and new support for on-prem deployment.

To help customers to achieve value quickly, Automation Anywhere is also delivering a suite of AI-powered solutions to help accelerate business outcomes across all key business functions.

• Automation Co-Pilot, the embed-anywhere enterprise assistant for organizations is now conversational (in preview status) thanks to a new integration with Amazon Q Service. It’s now faster for business users to get work done across any application with chat capabilities for on-demand assistance to ask questions of knowledgebases, call on AI Agents, or initiate automations. The enterprise-ready Automation Co-Pilot can be embedded in any application a user works in and action across any system in an organization.

• Service Operations Solution Accelerator, generally available, helps teams get to business impact faster with pre-packaged AI Agents and pre-defined workflows for a variety of service operations use cases. Employees can improve every customer interaction with the ability to not only quickly execute process automations, but now can call on AI Agents to complete cognitive tasks like order management, returns processing, and service Q&A. In 2024 and 2025, new Solution Accelerators will be rolled out for finance, IT, HR, and industries including Healthcare, Banking, and Manufacturing.

What this means for SAPinsiders

Share your experiences with intelligent process automation. SAPinsider will be publishing its next research report on Process Automation and Intelligence in July 2025. SAPinsiders have consistently indicated in research conducted recently that leveraging process automation and process Intelligence platforms will enable them to digitalize, discover, understand, and manage business process execution more effectively. While many of them may already have built a foundation in terms of process automation, Intelligent process automation capabilities will allow them to leverage advanced algorithms to model specific events across their processes, visualize these model to identify deviations, find process bottlenecks and perform root cause analyses of process failures. If you are interested in participating in this important research initiative, please email mark.vigoroso@wispubs.com.

Integration of Automation Anywhere with SAP should be a given. Automation Anywhere’s Automation Enterprise System includes pre-built SAP connectors that facilitate seamless data exchange with SAP modules like SAP S/4HANA and ECC. This enables end-to-end process automation without complex integration setups, allowing bots to perform tasks across SAP and non-SAP systems seamlessly.  AES’s SAP integration ensures that data remains up-to-date across platforms, minimizing data silos. For instance, in financial processes, customers can automate data updates across SAP modules, such as accounts payable, for real-time visibility.

Partner with Automation Anywhere to push the envelope with SAP-centric automation. Enhancing Automation Anywhere’s IQ Bot with industry-specific machine learning models (e.g., for finance, logistics, healthcare) could enable SAP customers to extract and process complex data from unstructured documents, such as invoices and contracts, with greater accuracy and speed. Also, by integrating predictive analytics and machine learning models tailored to SAP modules, such as SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP), the Automation Enterprise System could support SAP customers in better forecasting demand, optimizing inventory, and managing supply chains with data-driven insights.