Product Club Super Session Recap | Evolving Your Static Processes into Orchestrated Workflows

If 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

Oli Morris, Developer Evangelist
Vineet Pujari, Product Manager
Nishikanth N, Director of Product Management
 

TOPIC

In this super special Product Club Super Session, we examine the evolution of automation and discuss how you can go from creating static processes to sophisticated workflows that can think and adapt on their own.

Here’s a rundown of the session:

1. Vineet gives a look back at the early evolution of task bots and automated processes.
2. Nishikanth discusses modern process orchestration via Agentic Process Automation.
3. Nishikanth demos how to accelerate process orchestration with Process Composer. 
4. Vineet and Nishikanth answer live audience questions.

THE EVOLUTION OF TASK BOTS + AUTOMATION

Like watching a digital caterpillar transform into a cyber butterfly, let’s take a brief look back at automation's journey from simple task execution to intelligent process automation.

1. THE TASK BOT ERA - Characterized by rule-based decision making, repetitive task execution with limited scope and flexibility, isolated operation.
   • 1990s: Automation originated with early screen scrapers
   • 2000s: Basic data entry automation
2. THE TRANSITION ERA - The move from simple task automation to something a bit more sophisticated and platforms started talking to one another.
   • Integration capabilities emerge
   • APIs and middleware to connect systems
   • Cross-platform functionality
   • Basic workflow automation
3. ORCHESTRATION REVOLUTION - Automation becomes a symphony of processes that are working in harmony.
   • End-to-end process orchestration
   • Intelligent decision routing
   • Real-time adaptability
   • Multi-bot collaboration
   • Exception handling
   • Document Automation becomes part of an end-to-end solution

MODERN AGENTIC PROCESS ORCHESTRATION

“You cannot create tomorrow’s strategy with yesterday’s process.”
Our ways of automating needed a personality upgrade to become more like trusted advisors than mere digital assistants.
Enter Modern Agentic Process Orchestration!

Today, we are empowered by Agentic Process Automation with Process Composer, where you can automate and orchestrate across any applications. Process Composer accelerates development time and enhances automation resiliency compared to traditional UI-based methods with 4 layers of capabilities built into one unified engine:

1. Orchestration - This is where you design and implement complex automations, then bring them together in a seamless end-to-end workflow with RPA tasks, APIs, humans, and AI models. 
2. Dynamic Decisioning- This is where AI Agents step in to make smart, learning-based decisions, plus the ability to have multiple AI Agents collaborate dynamically and adjust to new data or changing conditions.
3. Deterministic Rules - This allows us to make data-driven decisions anywhere in the workflow, ensuring rule-based logic is applied where it’s needed. 
4. Observability - This is your command center with real-time monitoring and tracking usage of AI Agents and their prompt responses, helping you to identify issues, optimize performance, and ensure seamless execution of your end-to-end process automations.

PROCESS COMPOSER DEMO

If you have an Automator AI license, here’s how you can quickly develop an end-to-end process automation in Process Composer:

1. To start from scratch, click “Create” and you’ll be presented with a drop down of choices to select from: From Template, Process, Task Bot, API Task, AI Skill, or Form. If you already have a business process documented in the form of a BPMN diagram, you can retrieve that from your Control Room, then, using product that’s part of Automator AI called Autopilot, click the button to the right of that BPMN file called “Generate Automation.” This generative AI-based developer tool that allows you to create and edit your automations much faster, bringing down developer time by at least 30%.
2. Refresh your screen and you’ll see the BPMN diagram has automatically been converted into a process and the different steps have been broken down into individual task automations. Click the process at the top to open the process automation in Process Composer.
3. In the center pane of Process Composer, you have the canvas with your process outlined per your BPMN document. Here you can click on the steps to make changes or start filling in information like properties or configurations. In the left pane, you will see the different automations available to you. You can drag and drop these into the canvas to edit your process based on additional requirements you may have.
4. To further speed up your development, you can bring in the Automation Co-Pilot Assistant tool. With the Co-Pilot Assistant, you can give natural language prompts to make edits in just a few seconds.

If you don’t have Automator AI, here’s another way you can get started developing a process automation quickly:

1. Going back to the “Create” menu, select “From Template.” You will be taken to our library of templates that provide you a skeleton based on the common business processes we have observed from our customers across industries. You can preview the process by clicking the binoculars icon to open up the template content.
2. When you find the right template for your needs, select it and click “Continue,” then enter in a name for your process and click “Create & Edit.” 
3. Next, you can begin pre-filling details to make it even easier for your developers to take over. 

*Our next-gen Process Composer will be available to preview in late February 2025. Some new and enhanced capabilities include: swim lanes, minimap, and orphan nodes. 
Want to preview it yourself? Go HERE to fill in the details and submit your request for a preview.

SESSION Q&A

Thank you to our audience for submitting their questions! Unfortunately, we aren’t always able to answer them all during the live session. We want to express our gratitude to our special co-hosts, Vineet and Nishikanth, for providing their expertise and responses.

**Please note that all answers were shared live during the January 2025 meeting, and are subject to change. We strongly encourage you to contact your account management team for any specific licensing and pricing inquiries.

Q: How much time is potentially saved through things like Co-Pilot for Automators?
A: It depends on the complexity and size of the automation, but on average we’ve seen customer productivity go up at least 30%.