Microsoft Power Automate adds robotic process automation in April
Power Automate already helps hundreds of thousands of organisations automate millions of processes every day. With the addition of RPA, Power Automate will help these organisations to also automate their legacy apps and manual processes through UI-based automation. The key Power Automate capabilities we are announcing today include RPA general availability for attended and unattended scenarios, along with a flexible business model to support any business scenario.
Automate legacy and modern apps on one platform
Power Automate—the most comprehensive cloud-based automation platform—unlocks analogue data with AI, automates UI with RPA, and automates cloud applications and databases with built-in connectors. This comprehensive set of capabilities represents the next generation of automation and will be accessible to everyone in an organisation including coders and non-coders alike through a low code development environment and uniquely affordable licensing.
With Power Automate, we’re putting automation into the hands of all workers so that everyone can automate repetitive tasks across legacy and modern applications, and simplify how they work in a scalable, more secure way.
Completing the low-code automation portfolio
with robotic process automation
Across the software industry, numerous technology solutions help people do their job. But the widespread adoption of technology also means that businesses can end up with disconnected solutions that require them to patch together processes across siloed applications. In the past, joining disparate systems together was difficult or too costly because it required professional developers, especially when some of the data could still be on paper or locked in decades-old Windows or web applications.
Power Automate provides a single solution for end-to-end automation that spans on-premises systems and the cloud. This approach addresses three primary areas:
- Intelligent understanding of data:Structured and unstructured data from paper-based invoices to images can be easily understood and integrated with other critical business applications. With AI-driven capabilities like forms processing in AI Builder, end users can parse data from analogue sources.
- Connecting to over 300 modern apps and services: It is easy to work with information stored in the cloud or on-premises apps and databases. We offer native connectivity to common apps or a company’s APIs with over 300 connectors out-of-the-box and a no-code way to connect to any internal services.
- RPA connects to enterprise applications without APIs: Some applications are too old or expensive to support API connectivity. With UI flows, end users can automate their work in these applications by recording manual tasks such as mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, and data entry, and then automate the replay of these steps to integrate with more complex process automation’s.
The ability to use AI, API connectors, and RPA make Power Automate the most comprehensive automation platform available in the cloud today.
Ingram Micro, one of the world’s largest distributors and IT leaders in technology products, is using Power Automate to improve and automate workflows spanning multiple systems and functions such as new account creation and on-boarding, management of customer credit lines, transportation optimization, event management, and integration of external partner data into their internal processes and workflows.
“With Power Automate, we’ve been able to improve the customer and internal associate experience, and at a much faster rate than before, with 75% of Power Automate projects completed in less than 30 days. We are excited to see that Microsoft is investing and delivering in the area of RPA as Power Automate has been an important factor in modernising our business and we look forward to exploring opportunities with the new RPA capabilities coming this spring.” – Jim Annes, Vice President of US Business Operations and Transformation, Ingram Micro.
Democratising automation for all organisations
with attended and unattended RPA
Power Automate offers both attended and unattended RPA. This means you can record and playback actions with or without human interaction (attended and unattended, respectively). And, just as we democratised access to app development with Microsoft Power Apps, and BI with Microsoft Power BI, we are democratising RPA with Power Automate.
RPA capabilities will be licensed as part of two new Power Automate offers that provide organisations with the flexibility to address a range of attended and unattended scenarios. UI flow authoring and bot orchestration and management are included in both offers, with no add-ons required.*
Attended RPA
The per user with attended RPA plan provides the ability for users to run an attended RPA bot on their workstation. Priced at $40 per user/month, the plan is optimized to span legacy and modern applications by enabling users to combine UI and API-based automation. Additionally, attended RPA includes access to several AI Builder capabilities like forms processing, object detection, prediction, text classification and recognition, and more.
Unattended RPA
An unattended RPA add-on will be available for the new per-user plan with attended RPA, as well as the existing per-flow plan. Each unattended RPA bot is priced at $150 per month, and organisations can choose to scale the number of bots running autonomously as needed.
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