In case you haven't heard about Product Club — the Pathfinder Community Product Club is a monthly virtual meetup led by Automation Anywhere product leaders that focuses on our latest proprietary product innovations. It offers a place for community members to stay informed, connect with product leaders, and gain insights into real-world applications of the latest innovations in intelligent automation.
P.S. If you can’t attend a meeting, no worries — we'll be dropping a recap of each month's session right here in our Product Club hub.
HOSTS
Allison Able, Pathfinder Community Director
Malcolm Rieke, Director of Product Management
Charlie Needelman, Director of Product Management
Topic: Sneak Preview of Autopilot
March’s product focus was something extra special: an early preview of the newest addition coming to the Automation Success Platform—Autopilot!
Here’s a rundown of the session:
-
Malcolm gives a quick overview of some of Autopilot’s capabilities and the Autopilot user journey
-
Charlie walks us through a demo with Autopilot
-
Malcolm and Charlie answer live audience questions
If you’d like to watch the entire session recording with visuals from the demos, you can view it here.
INTRODUCING AUTOPILOT
Autopilot is a new capability coming soon that will span several of Automation Anywhere’s existing feature sets, from Process Discovery to CoE Manager to Control Room.
Autopilot User Journey:
-
Capture Automation Opportunities with Process Discovery
-
Analyze what users are doing within your enterprise
-
Generate a process definition document (PDD) with what a business activity entails
-
-
Evaluate & Prioritize in CoE Manager
-
Submit the PDD to CoE Manager as a pipeline opportunity for review
-
-
Build & Deploy in Control Room
-
Assign the opportunity to a developer to build – The developer can use Autopilot to transform the PDD into an automation scaffold
-
Please note: We have lots more exciting things to come with Autopilot – this is only an early sneak peek! Our hope is to check your pulse as to how much value you see in this product. We'd also love to learn what type of resources we can provide to help you understand Autopilot better and what you can accomplish with it.
DEMO:
Charlie demonstrated the ease of passing along a PDD from process discovery to newly developed automation with the help of Autopilot. Let’s look at how three roles in a company work seamlessly to identify and create a new Process Purchase Requisition automation:
-
Alan, the Business Analyst, logs into Process Discovery. From a process model he’s created, he clicks “Generate PDD.”
-
Here’s where new Autopilot features come into play! Alan decides this process is a good automation opportunity, so he clicks on a new option called “Submit Opportunity to CoE Manager.” A form pops up that he completes and submits along with the PDD to CoE Manager.
-
In CoE Manager, the CoE Lead, Minh, can log in and see the opportunity submitted from Process Discovery. She clicks on the PDD attachment to review and decide whether it’s a good automation opportunity.
-
Minh decides it’s a great opportunity and assigns it to a developer from a drop-down, who in this case is Marcus.
-
Marcus is logged into Control Room and receives a notification that a process has been assigned to him. Autopilot has already created a folder for him with the PDD.
-
Marcus clicks “Generate Automation” to have an automation instantly built from the data that was imported from CoE Manager, which leads to the creation of a task bot.
-
Marcus reviews this automation scaffolding to add specific details needed, but the actions are already there for him, along with comments about what needs to happen.
-
Once Marcus fills in the details of the actions...Voila! He’s got a running automation.
BONUS MINI PREVIEW
We had some questions come up regarding post-production, so we had to mention that Generative Recorder is also coming soon! Generative Recorder is an exciting feature that will detect an error—perhaps due to changes in the application—take information from the screen utilizing generative AI, and try to locate anything that's moved or translate for an old value to a new value, then rerun the application.
Generative Recorder and Resilient Automation will be the Product Club topic next month, so be sure to attend the session on April 9th!
POLLS & RESULTS
-
How does your organization currently approach process discovery? (Select all that apply)
-
The overwhelming top approach from our audience was manual interviews or assessments! Collaborative brainstorming sessions and continuous improvement initiatives were also a common answer, with only 8% of our audience making use of Automation Anywhere’s Process Discovery product.
-
-
How does your organization measure automation ROI?
-
Most of the live audience was evenly split between manual assessments to measure ROI and utilizing custom-built ROI calculators, which we’ve found is very common among our customers.
-
-
On a scale from 1-5, how important is measuring ROI and automation opportunities for your automation program?
-
Can’t say we’re surprised that the top answer was 5: measuring ROI is incredibly important to the success (and ongoing funding) of our customers’ automation programs!
-
-
What methods do you employ to document the business processes you aim to automate?
-
Our live audience was visual! The majority said they use flowcharts and visual diagrams to document processes, as well as Word documents or PDFs with process details.
-
-
In which area would you prioritize implementing Autopilot?
-
The audience was eager to implement Autopilot to improve financial transaction automations, as well as supply chain processes and HR workflows. All excellent use cases for Autopilot to streamline!
-
-
On a scale from 0-5, how likely are you to utilize a tool such as Autopilot for the automatic generation of automation scaffolds?
-
Our audience would prioritize use of Autopilot for automation scaffolds pretty high, with the top rankings in the 3-4 range out of 5.
-
-
We want to understand your specific informational needs regarding Autopilot. Please select the area in which you’d like additional details:
-
Most of our audience said they’d like to learn more about Autopilot use cases and applications as well as what the implementation process entails, so we will definitely work on making that information (and more) available!
-
SESSION Q&A
Thank you to our audience for submitting their questions! We want to express our gratitude to our product leader co-hosts, Malcolm Rieke and Charlie Needelman, for providing their responses.
**Please note that all answers were shared during the meeting in March 2024, and are subject to change. We strongly encourage you to contact your account management team for any licensing and pricing inquiries.
Q: Is this process discovery part utilizing FortressIQ, or is it a new AI model/approach with the Autopilot feature?
A: Yes, Process Discovery is the new name for FortressIQ. But CoE Manager and the Control Room at the end are different functionalities of the overall Automation Anywhere Platform. All of these things together incorporate Autopilot.
Q: Is the intention of Process Discovery to create a PDD that the Developer can use in place of an SDD (Solution Design Document)?
A: The PDD is more of the base description of the application interactions. The PDD will be an artifact that is part of the overall SDD and operational documentation for the complete automation.
Q: Is it correct that the license and application have to be installed on the customer machine in order to utilize Process Discovery? And to confirm, is that the case on clicking Start/Finish at the beginning and end of the process in question?
A: Process Discovery is licensed, so yes. The process is recorded via an agent/sensor. With Process Discovery, the employee being recorded does not have to click start or end to denote a particular process. You collect data at scale and use Process Discovery to identify the processes after.
Q: Is this available for only Cloud or on-prem as well?
A: Autopilot and Process Discovery are currently only available for Cloud. We’re looking at making those available on-prem later.
Q: Is there a way to determine ROI for the process in the CoE Dashboard?
A: Yes, CoE Manager is designed and meant to collect information about how automatable the opportunity is, and what the criteria are that you would use to measure that ROI. CoE Manager also integrates with Control Room for the purpose of monitoring ongoing invocations of the automation files for that opportunity to calculate ROI in real time.
Q: Is there a built-in process for approving the PDD before assigning to the Developer?
A: The built-in process for that is the CoE Lead. So, the CoE Lead’s job in this workflow is to review the PDD and determine if it's good for automation. If you're talking about approving the PDD itself, it's nothing built-in. The Business Analyst is supposed to be the expert who understands the process and should understand whether this is the right process.
Q: Is there any application on post-production stages? Such as self-healing for bots, etc.
A: We have a new Generative Recorder feature that self heals changes to applications during runtime. Look for Generative Recoreder in our announcements!
Q: When will this be available in Community version of A360 ?
A: This will not be available in the Community Edition. It also requires the use of Process Discovery and CoE Manager which aren’t available in Community Edition either. Also keep in mind that it will require the AI for Automator license SKU.
Q: Are we able to edit PDD before sending for approval?
A: Yes. The user/BA can edit the PDD however they want in diagram composer. That first diagram I showed you is where they can take and put together events in any order they want. If they generate the PDD and they realize they made a mistake, they can modify that diagram by adding other events or whatever they want to do. Then click Generate PDD again to get the new one before they eventually submit it.
Q: In regard to Generative Recorder....is it finding screen elements which have moved during run time and allowing the bot to continue without errors, or is it noticing differences during runtime and providing information which coders can use to update bots later on?
A: It's the first part. It actually will use multiple techniques to find things and have it continue to run without errors. Rajendra has some really cool stuff he's working on. Also, AI behind the scenes on this one.
Q: Will you be able to use your own template\coding guidelines for tasks generated by Auto Pilot?
A: What we're looking at is extending the different things we can take as input to Autopilot. We're starting out with our discovery tool, Process Discovery. But the roadmap includes uploading other types of business process definition or description documentation, then utilizing generative AI to convert those into the scaffold with the command actions. And then ultimately, almost fully running automation files. We're looking at opening that up to other methods including BPMN and standard operating procedures written in Word docs...a lot of different types of formats. So keep an eye out for that!
Q: Is Autopilot available already in latest version of A360?
A: GA expected H2 of this year. We are in preview now. If you are interested in joining the preview, let Allison know.
Q: Can you clarify - is it Autopilot or Co-pilot? The announcement and previous releases called it Co-Pilot, this webinar it's being called Autopilot.
A: This is Autopilot. Co-Pilot is a different product, but also very cool!
Q: How can we get access to preview features?
A: If you are interested in joining the preview, let Allison know.