We dusted off our cowboy boots and polished our belt buckles as Imagine 2024 returned to Austin this month. The annual Automation Anywhere conference unveiled various innovative products and enhancements designed to transform businesses through AI and automation. We can’t detail all 300+ new, enhanced, and upcoming AI-powered innovations, so let’s explore the five key takeaways from the event.

#1  Introducing the revolutionary AI + Automation enterprise system

Automation Anywhere’s new offering, the AI + Automation Enterprise System, truly stood out at the annual conference. The platform promises to revolutionize business operations by enabling customers to automate virtually anything. In addition to the platform’s cutting-edge automation technology, an AI layer assists customers in making informed decisions based on their enterprise data.

The solution is set apart by its unique generative AI models, specifically designed for automation use cases. These models have a massive influence on customer outcomes. They are constructed using detailed metadata from hundreds of millions of automations, facilitating customers’ transformation of their essential operations. The results are remarkable, with unstructured document processing accuracy exceeding 80% and a 50% increase in resiliency for automation deployments.

#2 AI Agents merge cognitive abilities with execution

The groundbreaking AI Agent Studio announced at Imagine 2024 delivers pioneering low-code tools that simplify the process of building, managing, and governing custom AI Agents that learn from corporate data, make decisions, and execute actions across systems responsibly. These agents marry AI and automation to perform complex tasks like choosing an optimal replacement for an out-of-stock product or intelligently channeling incoming customer service tickets to the right representative. They can also collaborate across enterprise processes to boost productivity.

AI Skills are innovative packages of generative AI capabilities that you can devise to support any task across your enterprise. They come with optimized prompts for consistently precise and relevant outputs. Custom prompt templates are currently available, with native prompt templates for everyday tasks like classifications, summarizations, and email generation coming soon. The product also features retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to reduce hallucinations and improve the accuracy and reliability of generative AI models using enterprise data. Security, data, privacy, and responsible use guardrails are also included in AI Agents, along with real-time monitoring, traceability, auditability, and PII masking.

The AI Agent Studio is an all-in-one toolset that empowers automation developers to build generative AI-powered agents effectively. Its open architecture allows you to start with any foundation model and allows you to connect with any model from leading vendors, including Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, and Google Vertex.

#3 AI solution accelerators speed path to ROI

Automation Anywhere’s new Solution Accelerators speed up the development of AI-powered applications. They offer development blueprints, process templates, step-by-step solutions, and training guides. Imagine creating dedicated assistants that can browse your knowledge bases, initiate AI-driven automation, and interact with other AI Agents to carry out high-cognition tasks like order management and returns processing.

The company has already rolled out the Service Operations Solution Accelerator. It’s designed to automate end-to-end processes such as order management, returns processing, ticket management, and service Q&A workflow. This results in improved worker productivity and a better customer experience.

Automation Anywhere plans to release other Solution Accelerators quarterly. These will feature capabilities to help automate complex finance, HR, IT, healthcare, banking, and manufacturing processes. The accelerators integrate multiple Automation Anywhere products, enabling business teams to interact with AI Agents across platforms like SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft, and even your custom web applications.

#4 Upskilled Co-Pilot now an enterprise assistant

Automation Anywhere showcased their focus on enterprise assistants that go beyond personal assistant tasks like setting timers and adding milk to your grocery list. Their Automation Co-Pilot grew 120% and is designed to transform businesses and break down silos.

One of the critical upgrades to Automation Co-Pilot is its conversational aspect. Workers can now chat with the assistant for real-time, on-demand help to swiftly overcome process hurdles and roadblocks. It is set to be integrated with Amazon Q, promoting easy adoption and increased productivity through straightforward and natural conversations. The conversational AI engine comprehends the questions and either delivers an answer or suggests automation. This can be done in any application where Automation Co-Pilot is present.

The enhancements to Automation Co-Pilot allow workers to have multiple ongoing sessions, mirroring human work. Moreover, improvements in the background facilitate automated user account provisioning, role mapping, and license allocations.

#5 IDP gets super-charged with Generative AI

Automation Anywhere showcased significant enhancements to Document Automation, the AI-powered intelligent document processing tool. It is now equipped with advanced generative AI, customizable for any document type, and can be incorporated into existing automations. This results in heightened speed, accuracy, and compliance.

Furthermore, Document Automation now caters to on-premises deployment for generative AI, connecting to private cloud generative AI models on all leading hyperscalers. This broadens accessibility to any document type, and the recent inclusion of document table extraction with generative AI allows for the extraction of more sophisticated table information from documents.

Over the past year, Document Automation experienced nine-fold growth. It now supports Anthropic LLM on Google Cloud and AWS for generative AI extraction, encompassing both on-premises and private cloud scenarios. Anthropic also provides an extended context window to accommodate more intricate queries and data extraction needs. The system now supports more than 30 languages, including Korean and Japanese. Lastly, introducing the new Document Workspace allows for a more efficient setup for document extraction, complete with real-time testing updates, tracking of versioned changes, and performance benchmarking.

That’s a wrap on Automation Anywhere’s Imagine 2024.

Let’s lasso a time to discuss how your organization can leverage the new capabilities. We can’t wait to see what Imagine 2025 brings us!