Like many businesses that provide process automation technology, UiPath has integrated AI into its platform. Even more than that, the New York City-based company has made agentic AI a priority moving forward. In a recent interview with Automation Today, however, UiPath Go-To-Market COO and Chief Strategy Officer Brandon Deer assured its customers that it isn’t just chasing the latest shiny new thing. The leadership team’s commitment to charting a market-leading course for the future is not replacing the core competency on which the company was built—it’s working side by side with it, he says.
Deer cut his teeth in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s with Intuit as part of its product development team before moving to the east coast for an opportunity as a venture capitalist. After five years of investing in other peoples’ ideas, though, he was looking for an opportunity to get back to being part of a team that built things.
As part of an investment firm that was evaluating UiPath in 2016, Deer met CEO Daniel Dines at a relatively early stage in the company’s development.
“He had been grinding for almost a decade in Bucharest, refining the software and planning a move to New York,” Deer remembers. “He had reached a sweet spot where you start to get the product-market fit, but my company passed on the investment. But I really liked Daniel a lot and we connected a number of times throughout the course of that year. I saw the progress he was making. I saw how he was refining his vision for the business. And I missed the camaraderie of building something together.”
After Deer joined UiPath in 2017, the company was perfectly positioned to take advantage of a wave of interest in automation software. Robotic Process Automation became a buzz phrase eventually, but the technology was truly novel at the time and the company had no problem communicating the ROI to customers and prospects. Software automation generated a lot of interest in businesses looking for more efficiency and productivity. As a result, UiPath experienced significant growth.
“It was a really exciting time,” he notes. “It ultimately led to us getting a little bit out over our skis.”
What Deer means, and what UiPath has acknowledged at recent customer events, is that initial optimism from the market, combined with a lot of investment, an expanding customer base, and rapidly advancing technology gave the company a lot of leeway to experiment beyond the RPA it had started with.
“Some of the decisions we made in those years led to less focus on our core abilities,” he says. “When you have a lot of great talent, a lot of great customers, a lot of money, you can test across a variety of surface areas. Some of those surface areas worked out. We’ve got some great core products beyond just RPA today, including IDP and process mining.”
In the time since, Deer says UiPath has worked hard to regain that focus in an environment that has become increasingly competitive. He says the company has come through a period of learning how to fight battles with well-funded, bigger competitors and the importance of directing its attention toward the markets that matter most. According to Deer, those include the RPA technology the company pioneered and agentic AI, which will unlock billions of dollars in value for users.
“We will continue to lead in the RPA market,” Deer states. “That’s our bread and butter. We continue to gain share and we continue to make improvements on the product, RPA and robotics. Our orchestration, our attended and unattended robotics, new agents for software testing, the various studios that we offer now across Studio X and test and pro-dev. We have a lot of engineering and R&D going into that core platform.”
As for AI agents, Deer says bringing them into an existing framework they’ve already handled at scale for very large customers, in regulated spaces, in countries all over the world, gives UiPath a first mover advantage.
“What we’ve realized over the last 18 months is that the opportunity that we’ve always talked about for attended automation and for doing things that are not as rule-based—giving users agency—is a far larger market opportunity. It’s growing super-fast. There’s equal energy and enthusiasm now for AI agents that we witnessed in 2017 and 2018 with RPA. It’s an advent with very clearly defined ROI. The beauty of it, in my opinion, for UiPath is that a lot of the core infrastructure, the orchestration, the security, the traceability—it’s all there.”
