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By now, many enterprises have begun exploring AI agents and determining whether deploying them is a viable option for their business. But many still equate agents with something most companies have had for years: automation.
Automation pioneer UiPath sees agents and orchestrating the entire ecosystem — a little differently.
The company announced its new UiPath Platform for Agentic Automation. However, it made clear that agents are not a new version of robotic process automation (RPA); rather, they are another tool that enterprises can integrate with RPA to complete workflows.
Daniel Dines, UiPath founder and CEO, told VentureBeat in an interview that agents cannot be fully automated as they are built today.
“The big problem with LLMs today is that they are nondeterministic, so you cannot run them directly in an autonomous fashion,” Dines said. “If you look at most implementations of agents, these are actually chatbots. So we’re moving from chat in, chat out to an agent that is data in, action out, where we orchestrate between agents, humans and robots.”
Key to UiPath’s offering is its AI orchestration layer, Maestro. It oversees the flow of information from agents to the human employee to the automation layer. UiPath described Maestro as a centralized supervisor who “automates, models and optimizes complex business processes” and monitors performance.
Breaking down agents and automation
Maestro takes user prompts and breaks down the process into manageable steps to complete it. Instead of allowing agents to access information indiscriminately, Dines said Maestro has three steps.
First, the agent takes the prompt, analyzes it, and recommends how to complete the query.
Next, a human user approves of the recommendation.
Then, an RPA tool will execute on that recommendation, completing the request.
Dines said Maestro makes the workflow more transparent and accountable because a human remains in the loop and a rules-based RPA finishes the task. For UiPath, separating agents that take in data to make a recommendation from the automation that acts upon that recommendation ensures enterprises don’t let agents have unfettered access to …