Putting Google Vertex AI to work

The power of generative AI + intelligent automation will democratize AI access and drive massive transformation in mainstream enterprise business processes.

They say lightning doesn’t strike twice. Early in my career, fresh out of grad school in 1994 as a pup business development manager at Silicon Graphics (SGI), I literally had a front-row seat to Jim Clark, the internet, and the Netscape browser. Almost thirty years later, in the twilight of my career, the hair on the back of my neck is standing up straight, and honestly, I feel like I am about to get struck again! This time it is Thomas Kurian, generative AI, and intelligent automation.

“The process of digitization is going to just accelerate. People are not going to go back to the way things were. They have certain expectations, and they're going to want that process of digitization which requires complete front-to-back automation, not just for efficiency but for competitive advantage. That is the vision that both Google & Automation Anywhere share.“ Thomas Kurian, President of Google Cloud, Automation Anywhere Imagine Keynote 2021

Generative AI + intelligent automation is the logical next step in the partnership

Going back to Google’s founding in 1998 and its move to cloud computing in 2008 paralleled Automation Anywhere’s launch in 2003. These two industry pioneers have almost 50 years of combined experience in search, AI, and automation. And today, this partnership is really igniting.

Automation Anywhere’s company driving vision is “Fuel the future of work by unleashing human potential.” To accomplish our vision, Automation Anywhere bet early and bet big to become the System of Action for generative AI. From our vibrant developer community’s generative AI challenges and commercially available ChatGPT integration to our thought leadership on intelligent automation platforms for generative AI and generative AI use cases in healthcare. For those of you not familiar with Google Vertex AI, it is a machine learning (ML) platform that enables application developers to train and deploy ML models and AI applications. Today, Vertex AI now leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as a powerful generative AI interface in our vast Automation Command library. Yes—that’s right—natural language input to describe and generate automation code!

While I was flattered, honestly, I was not surprised when June Yang, VP, Cloud AI, and Industry Solutions at Google Cloud, asked Automation Anywhere to be one of the first ISVs to build AI + Automation cases announced at the Google Data and AI Summit last week. In 2020, when we mutually decided to enter into our Co-Sell Strategic Partnership, Google’s deep arsenal of AI technology was one of the main motivators. Automation Anywhere leaned into integrating Google AI into the Automation Success Platform.

Better together: Joint solution innovation

Harness intelligent automation to drive transformation across the enterprise

Our Automation Success Platform has become the de facto “System of Action” for Google AI. The reason why I wasn’t surprised by Google Cloud’s announcement was because hundreds of our customers are already deploying Google AI with the Automation Success Platform, all on the Google Cloud platform. In my six years at Automation Anywhere and quite possibly in my entire career, I have never seen enterprise customers have such intense focus on a new technology. And rightly so when you consider the truly transformative capabilities of generative AI and intelligent automation. For example, a multi-national consumer products company is using Vertex AI to improve the customer experience. Their email complaint triage automation across hundreds of contact center agents’ Gmail accounts generates personalized email responses quickly and expedites resolution for the customers while reducing the processing time for the agents.

Enterprise-grade scale for limitless and responsible AI

Together with Google Cloud, our goal is to make it easy to build new generative AI-based apps and connect those apps to the full power of Automation Anywhere. This means that AI will be able to take action, all with the required enterprise governance and security needed. There are two key enabling requirements: trust and scale.

At Automation Anywhere, customer trust is our top priority. We have been impressed with Google’s disciplined approach to scaling their customer’s enterprise AI experience responsibly. Generative AI is exciting but new and complex. Enterprises have significantly different requirements than consumers. We are inspired by Google’s AI Principles as a credo and their depth of thought around such important issues as avoiding unfair bias, testing, and applying privacy-safe best practices. Generative AI and intelligent automation are a bridge to each other, coupling our groundbreaking, scalable enterprise-grade automation technology with Google’s AI security, compliance, and governance controls that enterprises demand.

In addition to our shared commitment to customer trust, we want to empower our customers to scale with their business. Our enterprise-grade, cloud-native architecture runs over 100 million mission-critical intelligent automations annually. Today, we have nearly 50% of the cloud automation market, according to IDC, and over 80% of new customers are deploying in the cloud. And because we offer tremendous flexibility, many of our customers choose to deploy on Google Cloud and take advantage of the many shared services.

Super-charging access “for the other 80%”

Generative AI is the most significant event in the history of enterprise automation and business transformation. Historically, access to the power of automation has been throttled to the roughly 10%-20% of enterprise employees who can program, consisting primarily of professional developers and only recently to citizen developers.

Using everyday natural language as an interface to create an automation action while abstracting the automation programming library from the user empowers everyone in the enterprise to be a creator (no programming courses required)! Despite only having access to 10% of an enterprise’s employees, over the past 20 years, Automation Anywhere’s #1 cloud-native intelligent automation has been widely deployed across every horizontal functional business process and every vertical industry with thousands of customers, has a bot store bulging with thousands of sample automations, and has hundreds of millions of automations running annually in the largest enterprises in the world. The marriage between Google’s generative AI + Automation Anywhere’s Automation Success Platform is democratizing AI, unleashing this productivity-enhancing power to every employee!

The awesome power of Google’s Vertex AI as an interface into our Automation Success Platform action framework could literally have a similar disruptive impact on enterprise business process as the Netscape browser and the internet had thirty years ago! Do you remember how you accessed content back then? TK is right when he said, “People do not want to go back to the way things were,” and thanks to Google and Automation Anywhere, we are about to experience a tectonic shift in how all employees work automating trillions of non-productive tasks. Strap in... it is going to be a wild ride, and it looks like I have another front-row seat!