Robotic process automation now in preview in Microsoft Power Automate

Today we’re announcing the preview of UI flows, which adds robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities to Microsoft Power Automate (previously Microsoft Flow). UI flows brings together the rich feature set of API-based digital process automation (DPA) that is available today, with RPA UI-based automation to create a truly end-to-end automation platform.

Put automation to work and focus on what matters

The enterprise application landscape is overrun with a mix of legacy applications and modern services, some running on-premises and others in the cloud. Organizations looking to scale often have multiple systems that don’t talk to each other, which creates a disconnect between legacy and modern applications and services. In an increasingly connected world, deep automation capabilities allow customers to do more with less across their business. Over the past year, we’ve seen increased interest from customers to optimize processes to deliver faster and higher-value results with little to no added cost, leveraging everyone from IT Pros and developers to end-users, to build apps and services that are scalable and highly secure across their organization.

Microsoft Power Automate already helps hundreds of thousands of organizations orchestrate the automation of processes every day, but we’re far from done.

Introducing UI flows preview, the new RPA capability

To support our customers’ growing needs to scale across legacy and modern applications, we’re pleased to introduce the preview of UI flows in Power Automate.

UI flows is 100 percent cloud-based and uses the same low/no-code experience that millions of people are familiar with in Power Automate today to build automation atop the UI of applications that do not have an API available. Organizations can automate repetitive tasks performed through a browser or the user interface of their Windows applications.

With UI flows, customers can record step-by-step UI actions such as mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry, and then replay those actions.

This enables organizations to:

• Automate in a single platform across apps and services that don’t have APIs
• Customize, build, and manage UI flows scripts in a secure cloud environment
• Leverage a low-code experience with a step-by-step record and play back experience
• Seamlessly integrate UI automation with API-based automation by combining UI flows with regular flows

Try the UI flows preview and learn more from the sessions and content we’re delivering at Microsoft Ignite, including our session on Intelligent Automation with Stephen Siciliano, in addition to a host of sessions covering Power Automate, the new Microsoft Flow.

What customers are saying about the RPA preview

Power Automate is helping customers go a step further in their digital transformation journey by automating legacy applications combined with modern apps. Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance in Japan joined the preview to reduce the number of hours spent manually creating, entering values, and processing from Excel and multiple legacy systems.

“We believe that the new RPA capabilities with Power Automate will empower all of our employees to automate their work and to focus more on highly valued tasks. We are betting on Power Automate as it does not require deep training and support to automate like our business-like other RPAs do—everyone is empowered to automate intuitively themselves. We have legacy systems that do not provide APIs, as well as web based on-premises services. Yet, we also have SaaS services like Dynamics 365, Power Apps, and Office 365. UI flows will act as the automation bridge that holistically covers our business process through the combination of UI flows and the rich selection of connectors that Power Automate provides.” – Takashi Yano, General Manager, Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance

We’re excited to work with customers like Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance, TruGreen, and many others to find ways to help them scale and grow to keep up with rapidly changing market needs.

A new partnership with FortressIQ to automate the automation

Understanding where your organization is spending the most time and energy, as well as which processes are repeated over and over, is the key to drive efficiency. FortressIQ is a leader in this space with their computer vision, machine learning, and AI-powered platform to help organizations identify inefficiencies and automation opportunities.

Today we’re announcing a partnership with FortressIQ that will deliver the ability to programmatically create a flow or UI flow directly from within their service. Imagine the following with FortressIQ and Power Automate:

• Leverage FortressIQ to get a holistic left-to-right view of your organization’s key opportunities to optimize processes
• Use the seamless integration between FortressIQ and Power Automate to automatically create the flow at the click of a button

“Microsoft’s RPA offering is a game-changer. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Microsoft to combine RPA and Power Automate with Fortress IQ’s AI-powered Process Discovery platform to significantly accelerate the path to and multiply the impact from automation.” – Pankaj Chowdhry, CEO and Founder, FortressIQ

Committed to broadening the RPA ecosystem offering across Microsoft and innovating together with our partners

As we expand the capabilities of Power Automate, we’re committed to continue growing the strong partnership across our system integrators (SI) ecosystem in the RPA space, as well as helping our customers and partners deliver on the promise of intelligent automation that transforms their products and services.

Power Automate is built on and powered by Azure. The same services and infrastructure our partners use to deliver their services are used to deliver our own. Spanning investments across Azure AI services, including Form Recognizer,  enables extraction of key value pairs from scanned images that open new ways to optimize existing core business processes to Microsoft Graph enhancements. All of this is making it easier and faster to access unstructured data in Office 365 to help drive business value for our joint customers.

We will continue building momentum and increasing capacity in this space with the system integrators we work with. Accenture, Avanade, EY, Infosys, KPMG, and PowerObjects are among those companies accelerating our customers’ journeys by building a comprehensive automation ecosystem.  

“We’re looking forward to collaborating with Microsoft as they extend the capabilities of Microsoft Power Automate into the robotic process automation (RPA) space. The combination of RPA and digital process automation (DPA) into one unified platform for clients to seamlessly automate the end-to-end process, in a low-code/no-code environment, will accelerate real customer value.” – Greg Jenko, EY Global Microsoft Services Leader

Get started with the preview

We’re excited to be at the forefront of the new age of automation and look forward to making this journey together with you, our valued customers and partners. Don’t forget to join us at Microsoft Ignite, and learn more about the UI flows preview.

Try the UI flows preview today.