There were a number of major announcements from UiPath Inc. this week, and one that has attracted attention is Autopilot, new generative artificial intelligence with specialized capabilities that will make it simpler to automate a business task using natural language.

Autopilot will be able to transform paper documents into business applications via a single click, according to information released by UiPath during its annual conference this week. The offering will enable developers to create automations, code and expressions, features that generated interest from UiPath customers such as the healthcare giant Merck & Co. Inc.

“The thing I’m most excited to see coming out of here is Autopilot and the potential that it could bring not just for coding, but for testing,” said Sonny Kocak (pictured, right), associate director of engineering for HyperAutomation at Merck. “The more stable your production is, the easier that people can sleep at night.”

Kocak spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight at the UiPath FORWARD event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Grant Harris (left), director of consulting services at CGI Inc., and they discussed an expanded collaboration with SAP and the growing role of automation in enterprise IT. (* Disclosure below.)

Migrating business systems

In addition to UiPath’s Autopilot announcement, the company also used its annual gathering to highlight a growing partnership with SAP SE. The expanded collaboration is focused on enabling migration of critical business systems to the cloud using the UiPath Automation Platform, a synergy viewed positively by CGI’s Harris.

“The closer relationship with SAP is absolutely brilliant,” Harris said. “It just makes a lot of sense because when you’re going out and touching applications outside of SAP, there’s not really any great tools. Some of the automations that you can build and that we’ve built in the past work brilliantly within SAP, pulling in some of the disparate data and making sure that you have a good end-to-end process.”

Harris observed that companies such as Merck and others are developing a baseline of experience in building automation processes that can achieve results within the business.

“When you are working with these automations over a period of time in each of the individual towers within Merck or within any organization, they are going to be different,” Harris said. “Not every manufacturer is going to be able to save the same amount of money on a certain process. The more data that you’re able to build up on what you’ve done in the past and how that’s really achieved the ROI, the better you’re going to be in the future as far as calculating that information.”

Merck’s automation journey has allowed it to take full advantage of advances in AI that have benefitted the company’s processes and business, according to Kocak. Yet he acknowledged that the technology is still in an early stage and automation will inevitably become ubiquitous.

“We have come a long way,” Kocak said. “If you look back a few years, it’s a great jump, it’s tremendous, that change has been impactful. But we’re just beginning. The businesses are going to leverage automation everywhere.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the UiPath FORWARD event:

(* Disclosure: UiPath Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither UiPath nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE