In the March Developer Meetup, Max Cassidy demonstrated the AI-powered capabilities available within the Automation Co-Pilot Universe, and Geoffrey Laissus and Micah Smith offered additional insights on these innovative products and answered live audience questions.

You can watch the full recording of the meeting here.

Let’s dive into a recap of the power of Automation Co-Pilot for Automators and Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users.

What is Automation Co-Pilot?

Automation Co-Pilot is a generative AI-powered assistant that can be embedded directly in users’ work applications, increasing business user and developer productivity by as much as 55%.

What makes Automation Co-Pilot for Automators unique? For Automators, Automation Co-Pilot assists developers by enabling natural language prompts to build automations and suggesting next actions to guide development and bolster productivity, all integrated centrally within Control Room.

And what makes Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users different? For Business Users, on the other hand, Automation Co-Pilot makes the experience of using automations already available to them seamless by embedding an easy-to-use interface directly in their preferred work application(s) and allowing them to collaborate with team members throughout the process.
 

Integration and Setup

Max walked us through embedding the Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users interface in Salesforce—what we call a “mod.” Remember, Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users can be embedded into any web-based application, not just Salesforce—think Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow, Workday, etc. Micah mentioned he’s even embedded it in LinkedIn and Twitter!

Automation Co-Pilot has a few prerequisites to configure before you can begin embedding the mod. There are 4 total steps which should take you about 20 minutes (at a leisurely pace) to complete and you can read about that process in the documentation here. Max’s mod integration demo starts once you’re all set up with your applications and widgets in the AARI panel.

1. In Salesforce, open up the Developer Console. You’ll see PixieBrix available in the menu bar. Select it and on the left-hand side click “Add“ and select “Sidebar Panel” from the drop-down. This sidebar will be the window into Automation Anywhere.
2. Delete the existing “Render Document” under your new sidebar panel brick and click the “+” sign to add a new brick. In the new window that appears, search for “iframe,” select it, and click “Add Brick.”
3. Head to your widgets in the AARI panel in the Control Room and click on the three dots to the right of your widget to open up the embed code. Copy the embed code, return to the Developer Console in Salesforce, and paste it into the URL field. Then on the far right click “Render Panel.”
4. Go back to Control Room to log back in and you will see the new sidebar in Salesforce refresh with your available Automation Anywhere automations, ready to execute! This is your new mod.
5. You can continue this implementation by adding a trigger to automatically open this new sidebar panel when Salesforce is loaded. Start by clicking the “Add” button on the far left and selecting “Trigger” from the drop down.
6. Under the Trigger Event drop down, you should select Page Load/Navigation. Then underneath your trigger, click the “+” sign to add a new brick. Search for sidebar, select “Show Sidebar,” and “Add Brick.” Now you have a trigger to automatically open your mod when the page is loaded.
7. One more customization you can make by again pressing “Add” on the left side is Insert Button/Menu Item. If you select this option, you can then hover over an existing button within Saleforce, click on it, and a new button will appear next to it that you can then assign an action to.
8. Enter a name for your button. Max enters “Automation Anywhere.” Then click “+” sign to add a new brick, search for sidebar, select “Show Sidebar,” and “Add Brick.” You can now press this Automation Anywhere button to open the mod and have access to run your available automations.

An important note here is that Max’s demo shows the developer experience setting up a mod for a business user. When you think about deploying this kind of capability more broadly, you would make sure that all of your users have the Automation Co-Pilot extension (PixieBrix), which is something that you can do through group policy. Your developer can create the mod and deploy it—they can assign it to certain users, or a group of users, or an entire team—and the developer has control over who sees what. Business users do not need to be involved with the configuration of the mod whatsoever. They will simply log into their work application and see a new button available for them to immediately use. Magic!
 

What You Need To Know About PixieBrix

• PixieBrix can be connected through a Chrome extension or an API key that will link your Control Room with your PixieBrix account. This can be deployed via group policy.
• Regarding security, all PixieBrie data is encrypted in transit with HTTPS and at rest via AES-256, block-level.
• The PixieBrix Chrome extension is compatible with on-prem control rooms. However, only Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users is currently available on-prem. Also, please note that some of the configuration still sits in the cloud, but only for the definition of what the mod is doing (like page to target, trigger config, etc.). No business or user data is ever sent to the cloud, it always stays local to the browser.

Executing Automation Co-Pilot for Automators in Control Room

For seasoned developers, Co-Pilot for Automators can greatly speed up all aspects of your development by allowing you to type out actions you want performed in natural language.

1. From your workbench in Control Room, click on “Co-Pilot” in the upper-right side of the screen. This will open an Assistant window to begin assisting you with your automation development.
2. Type the actions you want to automate in a natural language prompt. For this use case, Max inputs “I need to open my browser and open an excel dataset,” then clicks “Send.” In the background, generative AI is comparing the prompt to actions contained within Automation Anywhere to accomplish what you want done.
3. We see the triggers appear in the background—“Browser: Open” and “Excel advanced: Open”—including the variables. Now, as the developer, all you need to do is open the variables and populate the values where you want to navigate or the file you want to open.

Next, Max demonstrated the Suggest Next Action function. This function not only helps speed up development for seasoned developers but also to enhance learning opportunities for new developers to explore options that work with their workflow. Here’s how to invoke Suggest Next Action:

1. Click the three vertical dots to the right of one of your actions and select “Suggest next actions.” In this case, Max clicks next to “Excel advanced: Open.”
2. It suggests a loop, a recorder, and an if statement, which is a perfect suggestion. Max likes these suggestions so he clicks “Add” and those lines of data are inserted directly into his workbench. All of these new elements will continue to follow best practices.

What You Need To Know About Licensing

• Automation Co-Pilot for Business Users is available as part of the Automation Co-Pilot and Bot Creator license.
• Automation Co-Pilot for Automators is part of a larger package called Automator AI, which includes a slew of innovative features like Autopilot, Resilient Recorder, Gen AI Recorder, Smart Testing, as well as Automation Co-Pilot for Automators.
• Licenses for Automation Co-Pilot are available to use in developer mode for the Community Edition. You will not be able to deploy to other users, but you can build processes and test them.

The Future of Automation Co-Pilot for Automators

As you know, we are always working to improve the capabilities, functionality, and user experience of our products (thanks in major part to your consistent feedback!), so we’re not done with Automation Co-Pilot! Three major areas we are working on specifically for Automation Co-Pilot for Automators are:

1. Enhancing accuracy of the AI. We want to ensure what the AI builds is actually useful to you as developers
2. Improving the user experience. We want to give developers the opportunity to have more meaningful interactions with the AI assistant. For example, giving you the ability to have it redo or improve a specific line item, as well as the ability to give feedback on its recommendations.
3. Ensuring this is an enterprise-grade tool you can trust. We want you to be able to scale as needed and ensure the product aligns with your security policies.

Additional Resources

You can access the full documentation for Automation Co-Pilot here. We also received specific requests for the JavascriptSDK and dynamic data mapping documentation, which can be found here.