UiPath’s Second Act – RPA combined with agentic AI to enable real organizational change – diginomica

At UiPath’s annual conference this week, the keynote focused on the potential of automation to reshape how organizations operate at scale. Speakers from companies like Omega Healthcare and Canon emphasized the tangible impacts of automation in fields ranging from healthcare to finance.
The event opened with testimonials from customers who have successfully implemented AI-powered automation. Vijayashree Natarajan, Head of Technology at Omega Healthcare, emphasized significant operational improvements, particularly in invoicing, where automation has delivered a 99.5% accuracy rate – a substantial gain in the notoriously paperwork-heavy healthcare sector. Natarajan noted that this change was “transforming this paperwork and helping to keep healthcare healthy and affordable”, by increasing productivity by 100% and reducing turnaround time by 50%.
A significant portion of the keynote focused on enabling businesses to operationalize AI across enterprise workflows. Agentic AI and the ability to automate complex decision-making processes was the theme of UiPath on Tour in July, and came to the fore during the keynote. UiPath CEO Daniel Dines noted that agentic AI was the vendor’s ‘second act’, evolving beyond rule-based robotic process automation (RPA) to include more dynamic, decision-making capabilities. Referring to the potential of generative AI to handle unstructured data and nuanced decision-making processes, Dines said:
This is the first time in the history of humanity when we have access to a technology that can imitate our mind.
While AI agents are capable of performing high-level, non-deterministic tasks such as making decisions based on natural language input, they work in tandem with traditional RPA robots to execute structured, deterministic tasks. According to Dines, this combination of AI agents and robots allows businesses to automate entire workflows, moving beyond the limitations of traditional automation and going end-to-end in process automation, while maintaining human oversight for critical decision-making points.
This vision was echoed by Chandra Gnanasambandam, Senior Partner at McKinsey. In industries such as banking, where complex processes like loan origination and credit risk evaluation require both structured and unstructured decision-making, agents offer the potential to solve these workflows at scale. However, Gnanasambandam was quick to emphasize that these AI agents still rely on robots to handle individual tasks. “Agents need tools, and those tools will be robots,” he said, reinforcing the idea that both AI and RPA will need to coexist for businesses to achieve full automation.
Both Dines and Gnanasambandam, emphasized that while AI and automation can provide substantial productivity gains, these technologies must be accompanied by a shift in how organizations operate. Gnanasambandam, said it best when he explained: 
No more than 10-15% of the business case is actually technology; the rest is around change management.
This focus on organizational change was a theme across multiple sessions. For AI-powered automation to deliver its full value, businesses must rewire their workflows, retrain their employees, and adopt new operating models. 
Canon’s journey with AI-powered automation was one example of how customers making significant changes to embrace AI and RPA. Tom Olino, Director of Financial Systems and Process Improvement at Canon USA, detailed the company’s successful implementation of robotic process automation (RPA) across its financial operations.
Canon began its automation journey within the finance department, a natural starting point due to the abundance of repetitive and rule-based tasks, such as reconciliation activities and financial reporting. Olino explained: 
There’s a lot of routine activities in finance and accounting. It just makes sense when you see processes like reconciliation — pure definitions of tasks that automation can tackle.
Canon’s use of RPA extended beyond finance into supply chain operations, significantly improving efficiency across multiple sectors of the business. Canon’s RPA pilot started with five bots but quickly scaled to 165 bots in production. This expansion allowed Canon to significantly reduce manual errors and improve process accuracy, particularly in areas like invoice processing and supply chain management, where complexity often leads to inefficiencies.
While RPA has provided significant gains, Olino is also looking forward to the potential of generative AI. He described how AI-powered agents could eventually manage more complex workflows, eliminating even more of the manual oversight required in processes like financial reconciliations. Canon is now exploring AI-powered automation as a tool to modernize legacy systems and enable new levels of operational agility.
There have been plenty of changes at UiPath since last year’s conference, so it was reassuring to see the emphasis on customers during the opening minutes of the keynote rather than a smoke machine and lasers. While agents and bots naturally come under the spotlight, putting companies like Canon and Omega Healthcare add weight where words like ‘transformation’ and ‘orchestration’ are used freely. Jon Reed and I are on the ground in Las Vegas to dig into the details with customers and executives.
Disclosure – UiPath is a diginomica Premier partner at the time of writing.
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