UiPath Launches Immersion Labs for the Global Automation Era

Automation specialist UiPath is launching a series of immersion labsOpens a new window around the world, promoting an era during which it predicts businesses will routinely automate daily office tasks such as billing, form-filling and invoicing.

UiPath, founded in Bucharest, Romania, just openedOpens a new window its first immersion lab in Bucharest to demonstrate how Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, functions for clients and potential customers. RPA software replaces office staff for routine and repetitive clerical tasks.

It combines a variety of artificial intelligence technologies such as Optical Character Recognition to help read and annotate forms.

The software stands to save companies massive amounts of time and money by automating tasks. As an example, UiPath says, the robotic software will speed up such operations as clearing backlogs of insurance applications or inputting customer information into computer systems. These and other tasks are typically carried out by employees but can be undertaken far more quickly and efficiently by RPA software acting in their place.

Immersion labs will open in New York, Seattle, Tokyo and Bangalore, India, according to the company founded by former Microsoft employee Daniel Dines and Marius Tirka.

Prospective customers can test how the automation software would be implemented in their offices. They will input data to learn how the software would be applied to their specific needs, and they can send their automation specialists, IT staff and the others whose work will be affected to take part in workshops.

The idea of immersion labs was pioneered by Microsoft and Google.

Many believe RPA software will lead to widespread job losses among lower level clerical staffs. Britain’s National Statistics Office, for instance, recently estimatedOpens a new window that 1.5 million jobs were at risk of being lost to automation in the United Kingdom. UiPath’s executives, however, argue that automation rarely leads to large-scale layoffs; businesses, they say, tend to retrain employees for other tasks.

UiPath, based in New York, believes the immersion labs will become a key part of its sales effort over coming years as businesses  implement automation, which the company believes will overtake the cloud as the next big strategic direction for enterprises.

UiPath claims to be the globe’s biggest RPA specialist, with a valuation of $3 billion and 1,500 enterprise customers.

Investors are betting heavily on the sector. UiPath is reported to be raising $40o millionOpens a new window in Series D funding on top of the $406 million it has already raised.

A competitor, California-based Automation Anywhere, last year raised $550 million in Series A funding, including a $300 million investment from Softbank. Some observers say the total is a staggering sum for a first round of fundraising.

“The idea of the immersion lab is to move businesses from an early stage pilot of RPA – no one is doing Proof of Concepts any more – to scaling out through a number of process areas and countries and then to spread it out through the entire organization,” said Guy Kirkwood, a UiPath spokesman at a press event in Bucharest to announce the immersion labs’ launch.

He offered the example of Admiral Insurance of Britain, which started testing UiPath’s software in 2017 with a free license. “Now they have robots in every single one of their departments except the canteen,” he said. “They have RPA in the back office, in corporate functions such as finance, accounting and HR and it has moved into the industry-specific functions such as claims processing and first notice of loss and into the front office as well with customer experience and customer service operations.”

He said companies must include IT departments and boards of directors early in the implementation process.

“You have to involve the IT department from day one,” Kirkwood said. “Until recently, IT saw RPA as an existential threat. The raison d’etre of a chief information officer or IT director is to build a bright shiny new system with straight-through processing. If you have that, you don’t need robots because everything is connected through APIs.

Chief robotics officer Boris Krumrey explained how the labs work. “The customer comes with their teams,” he said, “and we show demos and the art of the possible, then sit together and talk about the next steps. It’s a service known as strategic immersion. If you go through Microsoft or Google, they offer exactly the same type of service. Then we have an immersion workshop” where customers bring anonymized data, examples of invoices and the like for processing.

“You’ll see so many Mickey Mouse demos, but customers need to look underneath the bonnet and understand how (to) configure this.”

UiPath predicts the market for RPA could be worth up to $70 billion within several years. One of the biggest growth markets is Japan, where the population is falling and there are increasing numbers of retired workers. The population squeeze puts more responsibility on existing workers, who are laboring an average of 60 hours a week. As a result Japanese organizations are looking for ways to automate many tasks.

“What we see in Japan today,” spokesman Kirkwood said, “is going to be replicated in every industrial and postindustrial nation over the next 10 to 20 years.

“They’ll need automation to help.”