Agentic automation is a technology unlike any we’ve seen before. Its potential to connect areas of the enterprise that have struggled to communicate in the past, and reshape work as we know it, is incredibly exciting.
It can also be nerve-wracking.
Before implementing any new technology, business leaders want several questions answered:
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What’s the business case?
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How do we measure success?
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What are others in our industry doing?
Because agentic automation is so new, these answers are still taking shape. But some organizations—including a number of UiPath Innovators—are further ahead than others. These trailblazers are part of a new program designed for business and transformation leaders committed to driving growth with AI and automation. And they’re starting to map out in detail what agentic automation will look like in their organizations.
After talking to a number of UiPath Innovators, several patterns emerged, including common use cases and plans to track agentic impact. In this blog, we’ll unpack what’s top of mind for a growing group of leaders ready to move agentic automation from idea to impact.
Where AI agents are set to unlock enterprise value
Helping systems and teams talk to each other
Despite the countless SaaS tools and communication platforms that comprise modern enterprise tech stacks, many organizations have trouble getting disparate systems and teams on the same page. Different data formats, ways of doing things, and workflows create silos that inhibit the kind of collaboration that breeds innovation.
UiPath Innovators have high hopes for agentic automation to break down these barriers and facilitate clearer information flows between people, systems, and robots. Manually bridging fragmented tools is a tall order, but agents have the intelligence and adaptability required to do so. This is a “big thing that’s top of mind” for Srinivas Nagarajan, previously at Deluxe, who believes that their organization can benefit from agentic automation’s ability to stitch together different systems and connect the underlying information.
Customer onboarding is an especially compelling use case for Deluxe.
I’ve seen significant value on the onboarding side—especially in cases where we’re dealing with a complex customer setup. It’s not always just direct customer onboarding; we may also need to onboard resellers, direct sellers, and various channel partners. These scenarios often involve very different or even disconnected processes that need to be stitched together from a business perspective.
There’s no shortage of business benefits to connecting disparate systems. In the public sector, subcontractor management can be a huge drain on time and resources. BDO’s Nicolas Sandros pointed to submitting multiple time entries through different systems as a particular pain point, and one that could be alleviated with the help of AI agents.
Ultimately, the common headache of translating information between people and systems is set to be alleviated with the arrival of AI agents.
Scaling operations without scaling headcount
Traditionally, there has been a one-to-one relationship between headcount and goals: if you wanted to accomplish more as an organization, you needed to hire more people. But resources aren’t infinite, which has historically capped the number and scope of projects enterprises can take on.
Agentic automation is changing this equation—forward-thinking organizations are already planning to leverage agents to accomplish certain goals without adding headcount. Areas like contact centers are particularly ripe for this kind of transformation.
The first area that we are focusing on is the contact center. What we’ve observed is a lot of the agent use cases of the heat map or generative AI shows high in the contact center/customer care use space regardless of what industry you come from.
Karthik Ramakrishnan, Tapestry
Similarly, Ramakrishnan points to internal help desks as a great initial agentic use case, because agents can “help our employees get access to information quickly and efficiently.”
But it’s not just call centers that can leverage AI agents to do more with the same amount of people. Some organizations, like Suncoast Credit Union, are thinking about how agents can accelerate their growth targets. Suncoast’s Dottie Dunn says the company is now asking “how many staff are we going to need to be able to double our members? We’re looking closely at the member to employee ratio.” Being able to amplify their impact with the same number of employees is the kind of big-picture thinking that lays the groundwork for significant ROI in these early agentic days.
Turning data into proactive decisions
Being able to do more with less by stitching together systems and automating a wider range of tasks is a massive benefit of agentic automation. But its potential stretches even further, including by helping organizations turn raw data into useful business insights. This complex work of surfacing trends, risks, and other patterns leaves more bandwidth for business analysts to interpret these findings and use them to help leaders act faster.
Ramakrishnan expects this functionality to help Tapestry’s executives answer questions like “why was there a sales dip in these specific stores between yesterday and today, and what was the reason?”
This ability to diagnose patterns in real time and reason through them can also be applied to monitoring project risks. In field service, where delays and cost overruns can add up quickly, this will be especially beneficial.
We’ve just scratched the surface here of all the agentic use cases UiPath Innovators have expressed excitement about. But just as important as finding compelling uses is measuring their impact.
How UiPath Innovators are planning to track agentic impact
UiPath Innovators aren’t just hoping for the best with agentic automation—they’re planning to track business impact in specific, actionable ways.
1. Efficiency gains
Ever since the early days of robotic process automation (RPA), efficiency gains have been a tried-and-true automation benefit. That will continue with agentic automation—but in more wide-ranging ways. UiPath Innovators are planning to measure time savings with familiar, concrete criteria, such as reductions in average handle time (AHT) for service interactions.
2. Cost savings
Pure monetary savings will always be an important barometer for executives. Ramakrishnan explained that, at Tapestry, agentic cost savings will be assessed in the form of deflection—having an agent perform a task rather than an employee doing it manually. That could be measured as dollars saved per minute or per contact, for example. The important thing is that “ROI is measurable and tangible.”
3. Revenue impact
Traditional automation has tended to focus on padding the bottom line by finding cost savings. But UiPath Innovators are realizing that agentic automation can have top-line impacts, too—if you know where to look.
For example, one UiPath Innovator shared that being able to provide faster delivery to customers is translating into new contracts.
Move from insights to action with agentic automation
The energy around agentic automation, both within UiPath and among our customers and partners, is palpable. And it’s growing.
UiPath Innovators are blazing the agentic trail—not just by automating more tasks, but by rethinking the way they work with connected systems, intelligent workflows, and a more efficient enterprise across the board.
We’re still in the early days, but the opportunity is clear: rather than waiting and seeing, organizations like these UiPath Innovators that start building an agentic framework now will be in prime position to deliver compelling ROI for years to come.
UiPath is the agentic automation platform ready to support what’s next. Try it for free today.
If you missed the UiPath Agentic Automation Launch event, you can watch the replay.
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