Automation Anywhere’s new platform release helps companies leverage business automation anywhere

Business automation software company Automation Anywhere Inc. It is expanding its core offering with the launch of its 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 accessible to everyone in their organization. Automation Anywhere is a leading player in the so-called robotic process automation space and recently raised $200 million in new funding. It has established itself as an offering that helps companies facilitate repeat business.

The platform works by looking at how an employee interacts with an application — for example, manually entering data from an application into a spreadsheet — and creating intelligent bots that can perform those tasks automatically. The idea is that the employee will have more time to focus on challenging problems that bots can’t solve.

The company has created a cloud-native platform that can interact with dozens of common business applications, such as Salesforce and Microsoft Office. Employees can use the platform to create their own automation bots without any code. Alternatively, users can access a catalog of prepackaged automation workflows for common enterprise use cases.

The update announced at Imagine 2022, Automation Anywhere’s annual user conference, is all about increasing the accessibility of these capabilities. The company said that this is important, because although most enterprises have adopted automation, a recent study by Deloitte Touch Limited showed that only 13% of companies have increased their automation efforts.

Perhaps the biggest update in today’s release is AARI for each application. AARI was launched last year and is a tool that allows employees to teach RPA bots to perform business tasks using natural language commands. With the update, employees can engage with AARI in any business application to create a bot whenever they feel like they’re working on something boring and repetitive.

The automation success platform is from artificial intelligence startup FortressIQ Inc., which it acquired last year. Adds process discovery capabilities. With these new capabilities, Automation Anywhere can use AI to quickly map and reveal new automation opportunities across all systems, tools and processes used in the organization. These opportunities are ranked based on potential return on investment, so companies can quickly identify which tasks and processes should be automated next.

The new document automation tool, meanwhile, does what one would expect, extracting data from any document and transferring it to any application. What’s more, it’s flexible as users can choose their own pre-trained AI models from Automation Anywhere 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 that helps build, monitor and measure automation in a centralized command center. This way, team leaders can manage everything from idea submission to ROI measurement management and access controls in one place. Finally, the company announced the new Automation Pathfinder program for companies looking for help scaling automation. The program provides a framework for best practices, access to expert services from partners, and more.

International Data Corporation analyst Maureen Fleming gave Automation Anywhere’s new platform the thumbs up, saying businesses urgently need to accelerate digital transformation and scale automation to capture significant time and cost savings. “Solutions that effectively break down the barriers to scaling automation efficiently and safely will solve these challenges and forever change the way we work,” she says.

Image: Automation Anywhere