Generative Recorder and Resilient Automation | April 2024

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
Rajendra Vijay, Director of Product Management
Murali Pallikonda, Principal Product Manager
 

TOPIC

For April’s Product Club, we brought you all the highly anticipated topic you’ve been requesting: Generative Recorder & Resilient Automation!

Here’s a rundown of the session:

1. Rajendra reviews Generative Recorder and demos a use case.
2. An MVP gives feedback from his use of Generative Recorder during beta testing.
3. Murali reviews Resilient Automation and demos how this feature works.
4. Rajendra and Murali answer some audience questions live.

If you’d like to watch the entire session recording with visuals from the demos, you can view it here

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Want to read through additional resources on Generative Recorder and Resilient Automation? You can find more information here 

PATHFINDER ANNOUNCEMENTS!

• We have NEW Delta training offerings for the .31 release available in AAU - They are action-packed, hands-on mini courses! Be sure to check them out.
• Developer Meetup this month is 4/28 on the topic of API Tasks

AUTOMATOR AI REFRESHER + INTRODUCING GENERATIVE RECORDER

Automator AI is a new offering for cloud customers, designed to accelerate developers across the automation lifecycle.

With Automator AI for Cloud, we’ve created an entire automation lifecycle powered by generative AI so CoEs and business teams can:

• Accelerate discovery to automation with Autopilot (A.33 GA)
• Reduce automation building time with Co-Pilot for Automators and Suggest Next Actions
• Decrease time spent on test and documentation (Roadmap)
• Minimize business disruption by cutting down on automation failures with Generative Recorder

In this Product Club, we’re zooming in on the much anticipated Generative Recorder - which will be available for cloud customers this month (April 2024) with the A.32 cloud release!

Generative Recorder was designed to minimize business disruptions, improve developer productivity, and auto-update automations to improve resiliency. In customer previews, we’ve observed nearly 50% success rate for automation failures that are addressed by Generative Recorder.

Generative Recorder addresses two major use cases that are critical pain points for customers across the board:

• Web Application Upgrades that break UI-based automations
• Automated Applications with dynamic elements that typically break on other developer’s machines or in higher environments, causing outages for all developers and the automation program as a whole.

DEMO: ORDER CANCELLATION WITH GENERATIVE RECORDER

A reception clerk, Bria, receives goods from suppliers and must cancel orders in her CRM system for any undelivered goods.

1. Bria has Automation Co-Pilot embedded in her SAP workflow. To trigger an Order Cancellation process, Bria selects the name of the supplier from a drop down list in her Co-Pilot window and clicks “Submit.”
2. An API task is triggered to fetch the outstanding orders from the selected supplier. The orders are returned for Bria to review in her Automation Co-Pilot window, and she selects the one that needs to be cancelled, then clicks “Submit.”
3. An RPA task is triggered that runs on a remote machine. The RPA task automatically logs into Salesforce and cancels the order that Bria selected. However, since Salesforce was recently upgraded, the task runs into a failure.

Now, let’s go back and review how this failure is avoided once Generative Recorder is turned on.

1. To turn on Generative Recorder: Go into the automation performing the RPA Task. Click ”Advanced Settings” and under the Package Settings drop down you’ll see Recorder. When you expand the Recorder section, you’ll see two options for the Generative Recorder to select, both of which can be toggled on and off on an as-needed basis by developers:
   • Native Fallback - uses the design time data to provide the fallback in the event of a failure.
   • Generative AI-based fallback - uses live application data to offer the fallback. Note: we ensure that no business data from the business application leaves your data center.
2. For the demo, we’re selecting Generative AI-based fallback. Click “Save.”
3. Now, we run Bria’s Order Cancellation process again in exactly the same way. Once we see Salesforce open in the production environment again, with Generative Recorder turned on, the RPA task logs into Salesforce and successfully searches the order number and then goes on cancel the order, as requested by Bria.
4. When we pivot to the developer view and run the same Order Cancellation process, we see the developer has additional visibility once the Generative Recorder kicks in to prevent failure. A pop-up box appears with a notice of failure prevented on line 11 and an option for the developer to automatically update the new DOMXPath inside the automation. The developer can select “Stop Automation,” “Skip update,” or “Update value.”
5. We select “Update value” and when we go to check line 11, we can see the path has been updated inside the automation. Even if the fallback is needed on 5 lines or 10 actions, for example, developers will receive an option to update the new path that was used for successful fallback for all of those lines/actions. There is also always an undo/redo option so the developer has full control should they change their mind.

RESILIENT AUTOMATION: RECORD AUTOMATION EXECUTION

When automations run into issues, sometimes it’s easy to replicate the issue and sometimes, unfortunately, it’s not. Resilient Automation minimizes automation downtime with faster troubleshooting by recording automation executions, securely storing those recordings, and providing playback. To ensure we are safeguarding your data privacy, all recordings are encrypted before being stored in the cloud and only authorized users can download the recording from Control Room and play it back.

Let’s walk through configuring the different Resilient Automation controls:

1. First, in Control Room settings, if you expand the Bots section, you’ll find Resiliency Settings. If you want to enable this feature only on one specific environment like UAT or Dev, but not in production, you can toggle the option under “Store execution recording” on or off in that given Control Room.
2. When it is enabled, you can set up your default options. First, you can determine what recordings you want to keep. If you want to keep recordings only when there’s a failure, select “Only failed executions,” or if you want to keep recordings no matter what, select “All bot executions.” Next, you can configure the duration of the recording. 5 minutes is the default and the maximum amount of time we currently support, but you can shorten it to less than 5 minutes (e.g. 1 minute) if you think you don’t need that long and want to prioritize free space for more videos. Finally, you can determine how long you want to keep recordings in the cloud. By default, we keep videos up to 7 days, but you can change that from anywhere between 1 and 30 days.
3. When it comes to the deployment of automations, there is another level of control available to you. Once you select your run as users, you’ll see a tab called Resiliency Settings. As the Automation Admin or the Developer, you can decide whether you want to keep recording on for this particular deployment. Even if it is enabled at the Control Room level, you still have control for which automations you want this feature toggled on or off. This is available for both run on demand and schedule options.
4. Under General Settings, we also have an option to hide the bot run window, so you will not see the runtime window when the bot is executing. This is another enhancement that we added based on customer feedback. Customers told us that sometimes the resolution is so small at their environments, and this runtime window blocks a majority of the screen, covering very important information that is critical for troubleshooting that issue. So now you have the option to hide the window away while the bot is executing. This is enabled by default.

Murali ran a sample automation to create leads in Salesforce. Here’s how Resilient Automation works when running an automation:

1. As the automation is running, Resilient Automation records the entire screen.
2. In Control Room, when you open the Historical window, you can click on the bot execution activity entry and see the bot run clip uploaded in the window. Underneath it very clearly displays how many days you have until the clip expires, based on the number of days you already pre-determined to store clips.
3. Using our existing permission model, if you have access to view the historical activity entry, then you have access to download it. If you have permission to manage activity, then you are able to delete the recording if you’d like to free up space.

Note: Storage depends on the number of licenses that you have on the Control Room. We reserved 100MB per runner license, depending upon the number of runner licenses you have times 100 MB will be the maximum storage available for your recordings. So that is how you can determine the maximum amount of storage reserved for these recordings in our cloud. Once you reach your limit, then we go first-in-first-out basis to automatically delete the old recordings and make room for new recordings. We enforce this at the tenant level, not the user level.
 

AUDIENCE FEEDBACK

We poll our live audience during these sessions to gain insights and share feedback. Here’s what we learned from our attendees during this month’s session:

• The audience came into this Product Club meeting knowing very little about the Generative Recorder and Resilient Automation products—rating an average of 2 on a scale from 0 to 5, with 5 indicating expert-level awareness. But everyone attending was extremely eager to learn more!
• We found that the vast majority of the audience uses web-based applications in their automation programs (over 55% indicated 60% or above) and frequently find themselves in a challenging situation when it comes to troubleshooting those automations. 51% said they spend anywhere from 1 to 3 hours and 24% said they spend 4 to 5 hours troubleshooting automations every week.
• After listening to the presentations from Rajendra and Murali, the audience indicated they see the value of Generative Recorder and Resilient Automation (with 60% of attendees ready to get started) specifically in terms of saving time, eliminating troubleshooting headaches, and being able to leverage auto-updating technology for UI elements in web-based applications.
• Finally, audience members shared the business applications they use that they believe would benefit most from Generative Recorder: Workday, Salesforce, Oracle Fusion, and RevCycle. They hope to see those on the roadmap soon.

SESSION Q&A

Thank you to our audience for submitting their questions! Unfortunately, we couldn't answer them all during the live session. We also want to express our gratitude to our product leader co-hosts, Rajendra Vijay and Murali Pallikonda, for providing their responses.

**Please note that all answers were shared during the week of April 8, 2024, and are subject to change. We strongly encourage you to contact your account management team for any licensing and pricing inquiries.