May 2026 Product Club | A Deep Dive into CoE Manager

Hey Pathfinders!

If you missed May's Product Club, don't worry, we've got you covered. Hosted by Shreya and joined by Arun K. Mudaliar, Principal Product Manager at Automation Anywhere, this month's session was all about COE Manager and some shiny new features that just dropped in version 40. Here's what went down:

(for the full experience, watch the recording below)

CoE Manager provides you with visibility into your program

As automation programs grow from a handful of bots to dozens (or hundreds!), the question shifts from "can we build more?" to "how do we know what we've built is actually working?" Governance gets messy, ROI gets murky, and suddenly your pipeline is running on gut feeling instead of data. That's exactly the gap COE Manager was built to close.

CoE Manager tackles your governance and pipeline issues

COE Manager tackles two big challenges: pipeline and governance (managing your entire automation estate from idea to deployment) and tracking KPIs and realizing value (going beyond bot-run stats to show business leaders what automation has actually done for the business).

Worth noting: COE Manager isn't limited to Automation Anywhere automations. It integrates with UiPath, Blue Prism, Power Automate, and more, as long as there's an API interface to connect with.

The star of the show: user-defined business KPIs (New in v40!)

This was the big new feature Arun walked us through. Instead of only tracking dollar savings, you can now define your own custom KPIs at the business unit level. Think CSAT scores, compliance rates, support ticket volume, cycle time, error rates. If your leadership cares about it, you can track it.

Here's how it works in plain terms:

• A business unit stakeholder defines which KPIs matter and sets a threshold (for example, a CSAT target of 9.2)
• Individual opportunities (the automations tied to those business processes) can set their own targets within that framework
• COE Manager then charts those KPI values month-on-month and correlates them directly to your automation activity

The result? A data-backed story you can walk into a leadership review with, no spreadsheet wrangling required.

How to feed in the data

Arun demoed two approaches for getting KPI data into COE Manager:

1. The CoE Manager Sync Bot (available in the Agentic App Store!) - A ready-made command package using just three actions: start session, update metric, end session. Perfect for piping in data from within your automation workflows.
2. Direct API calls via GraphQL - For data that lives outside your bots entirely, like CSAT scores sitting in a survey tool, you can pull that data and push it straight into COE Manager via API.

Demo Walkthrough: The no-code custom dashboard builder

Arun walked through a live demo covering:

• The no-code custom dashboard builder, where you can build role-specific views, add charts, configure drill-downs by business unit, and even build actionable dashboards with approve/reject buttons for leadership
• The four pipeline stages (Idea, Pipeline, Build, Deployed) and how opportunities move through them
• How labor costs are calculated using inputs from the idea intake form (% automatable, number of people, hours per person, run frequency, average hourly pay) and how "number of records processed" differs from "number of times performed" for variable-volume processes like invoice processing
• How to add costs (bot runner licenses, build costs, maintenance, infrastructure, etc.) so you're tracking true ROI, not just gross savings

Q&A Highlights

A few great questions came in from the community:

Is COE Manager part of the control room? Nope, it lives separately (built on the Shibumi platform). The control room is for the IT and automation team; COE Manager is also built for business leadership, so keeping them separate is intentional.

How do you share dashboards with stakeholders who don't need full access? You can create role-specific dashboards scoped to exactly what a leader needs to see, then assign them a Sponsor or Collaborator role. When they log in, that's all they'll see.

How do you enter costs? Inside each opportunity under the details tab, you can add costs as one-time, monthly, or yearly entries. COE Manager factors those in automatically so you're tracking true ROI with a real break-even point.

Want to Explore CoE Manager?

Arun is offering a 90-day POC instance so you can see the platform in action with your own data. Reach out via your CSM, account manager, or write to us at community@automationanywhere.com. You can also check out the two COE Manager learning paths in Automation Anywhere University (links were dropped in the chat during the session).

See you at the next Product Club!