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Microsoft revealed its UI flows tool for Power Automate in late 2019, hailing it as the capability that would re-define the cloud service as a robotic process automation (RPA) solution.
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It introduced that Power Automate’s robotic course of automation characteristic UI flows will hit general availability on April 2.
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The tech company has shared pricing rates for attended and unattended RPA.
Microsoft announced that Power Automate’s robotic process automation (RPA) feature UI flows will hit general availability on April 2. The company also detailed Power Automate’s support of attended and unattended RPA scenarios, as well as their pricing.
At Ignite 2019 in November, to align with its Power Platform, a business tool that lets anyone analyze, act, and automate across their organization. That’s when the company added UI flows to Power Automate in public preview.
that relies on bots or AI workers. It’s supposed to eliminate repetitive tasks so humans can do what they do best. Power Automate already helps organizations automate millions of processes — adding RPA is meant to let them also automate their legacy apps and manual processes. In short, Microsoft is attempting to offer API-based automation and UI-based automation in one tool. Power Automate’s AI builder lets you parse structured and unstructured data from paper-based invoices, images, and other analog sources. Prebuilt connectors for more than 300 apps and services support API automation for working with information stored in the cloud or in on-premises apps and databases. And for the applications that are too old or expensive to support API connectivity, UI flows let you record manual tasks, such as mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, and data entry.
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Pricing: Attended and unattended RPA
Robotic process automation’s two primary categories attended and unattended, both perform automated processes by emulating human workers. Unattended automation is used to fully automate high-volume transaction-based activities and processes. Unattended automation are generally leveraged in task-heavy back-office environments; however, some repetitive end-to-end contact center processes can be completed using unattended RPA. Unattended robotic process automation can run on a dedicated workstation, server, web or mainframe. Once programmed, unattended RPA solutions do not require human intervention; they replace work performed manually by employees with a fully automated process. Unattended RPA applications can be invoked by a schedule or timer, a trigger such as an email, file or queue task, called up by another application or can run on-demand.
Attended RPA is more commonly used in contact centers. Attended automation runs on the agent’s desktop and is invoked by the user via context-based screen triggers, an embedded screen button or hotkey, etc. An attended RPA application “works” alongside agents to improve productivity and quality. It provides employees with real-time process guidance and automates routine activities associated with the process in a fast and accurate manner. Attended and unattended RPA can also be used together in a hybrid model. A task can start with an agent and be enabled by attended automation, which can kick-off unattended RPA to complete the process. Both attended and unattended automation software can be deployed without modification to the applications or systems being automated.
“Power Automate already helps hundreds of thousands of organizations automate millions of processes every day. With the addition of RPA, Power Automate will help these organizations to also automate their legacy apps and manual processes through UI-based automation.”
Charles Lamanna, Micosoft CVP
Microsoft shared that it will license these capabilities as two new Power Automate offers, both of which include UI flow authoring, bot orchestration, and management. Here’s the breakdown:
Attended RPA for $40 per user per month: The per-user with attended RPA plan provides the ability for users to run an attended RPA bot on their workstation. The plan is optimized to span legacy and modern applications by enabling users to combine UI and . Additionally, attended RPA includes access to several AI Builder capabilities, like forms processing, object detection, prediction, text classification and recognition, and more.
Unattended RPA for $150 per bot per month: 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. Organizations can choose to scale the number of bots running autonomously as needed.
“The low-cost strategy should greatly expand adoption. It will also likely have a major impact across the RPA landscape. Cost has certainly been a major point of concern for customers, especially those that are looking to scale the automation.”
Microsoft also noted that it retains the right to change pricing between now and April.
As RAP involves automating repetitive and tedious processes within organizations, it is dominated by three pure-play software vendors. UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. These companies are some of the fastest-growing in the tech industry and have raised substantial amounts of venture capital. And the mega-companies want to get a piece of the RPA opportunity. And the one that is perhaps is Microsoft.
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This should be no surprise. The company has a massive roster of corporate customers, a strong global infrastructure and a vast ecosystem of partners and developers. It also helps that , which is now second only to Amazon. With this new RPA feature, Microsoft has already started to climb the hill.