UiPath built one of enterprise software’s most recognisable automation franchises by promising to eliminate repetitive, rules-based work traditionally performed by humans.
The company rode the enterprise automation boom to a valuation of more than $35 billion at its 2021 peak, but today it is worth barely one-sixth of that, with a market capitalisation of around $6 billion.
The arrival of generative AI, however, has reshaped that story. Investors and industry observers have debated whether AI agents could reduce the need for traditional RPA platforms or fundamentally change how enterprise workflows are automated.
If a developer can spin up a coding agent, use computer-use tools to interact with any interface, and deploy the resulting automation on a hyperscaler, why exactly does anyone need UiPath?
The Orchestration Bet
Chief Product and Technology Officer Raghu Malpani tells AIM that he considers the argument neither a headwind nor a tailwind. “I just consider that to be a confusion.”
Last month, the company launched UiPath for Coding Agents, a platform-wide integration that lets enterprises run coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex inside its orchestration and governance infrastructure, rather than alongside it.
The idea is that enterprises plug these agents into existing UiPath layers without rewriting any of them.
“You are configuring the already hardened established layers to build your automations,” Malpani says. “In that sense, the ability for an enterprise to get ROI, quality, governance, auditability, and security is more turnkey with a UiPath coding agent as opposed to using coding agents from scratch.”
The confusion he is pointing to is the assumption that enterprises can vibe-code their way to production automation overnight, without rebuilding governance layers, audit frameworks and years of accumulated product knowledge from scratch.
The coding agents launch is the latest in a series of moves UiPath has made over the past several months to position itself inside the AI ecosystem rather than against it.
Last September, the company announced partnerships with Nvidia, Snowflake, Google and OpenAI in a single coordinated release, each designed to embed its platform deeper into the agentic AI stack.
Around the same time, it launched Maestro, an orchestration layer built to coordinate AI agents, deterministic bots, and human oversight within a single governed system.
A key question regarding UiPath for Coding Agents is who will actually use it and whether granting non-technical users access could create a maintenance burden for IT teams. Malpani says the immediate focus is on helping existing developers become more productive rather than enabling business users to build automations independently.
Longer-term, however, he expects UiPath's combination of low-code interfaces and coding agents to lower the technical barrier to developing automation, allowing more citizen developers to create and validate workflows through visual tools rather than traditional programming.
On the question of UiPath's long-term relevance to enterprises seeking ROI from AI, Malpani points to a decade of accumulated institutional knowledge that he argues cannot be replicated quickly. Combined with the company's investment in orchestration and coding agents, he believes that experience creates a durable competitive advantage.
“We understand where these processes pass and fail. We understand how gnarly enterprise environments tend to be,” he says.
Malpani argues that enterprise workflows are rarely fully automatable, instead combining AI agents, deterministic processes and stages where humans must remain in the loop. In that environment, he says, orchestration becomes a critical layer that UiPath needs to build beyond its RPA heritage.
While AIM spoke to Malpani before the company's Q1 FY2027 results, CEO Daniel Dines offered a similar perspective on the earnings call.
“A probabilistic technology is not architecturally meant to follow dozens, sometimes hundreds, of steps in the same sequence,” he says. “Many regulated industries cannot tolerate anything that is not 100% reliable.”
The distinction goes to the heart of UiPath’s AI strategy today. LLMs excel at handling ambiguity and generating content, but enterprise processes such as financial approvals, compliance reporting, and regulated workflows often require deterministic execution, in which the same inputs must always produce the same outputs.
What the Financials Show
UiPath shares remain roughly 80% below their all-time high, reflecting slowing growth, broader software-sector repricing and investor concerns about how AI reshapes the automation market.
The stock still trades well below the analyst consensus target of ~$14.
The financials, however, are beginning to tell a different story.
In Q1 FY2027, UiPath reported revenue of $418 million, up 17% year on year, while ARR climbed 12% to $1.901 billion. The quarter also marked the company's first-ever GAAP-profitable quarter, with operating income of $28 million, compared with a loss of $16 million in the same period a year earlier.
That result followed a similarly historic full year. FY2026 was the first time the company reported annual GAAP operating income of $57 million on $1.611 billion in revenue.
The more telling indicator may be the mix of growth at the high end of the customer base. In the quarter, AI was part of 16 of the top 20 deals, and AI-linked expansion deals were six times larger than those without AI.
UiPath also disclosed $200 million in ARR from AI-related offerings, including agents, Maestro and Intelligent Document Processing. CFO Ashim Gupta said that among the company's largest customers, most transactions now have a significant AI component.
The company is also seeing early signs that its products can sharply compress deployment timelines. According to UiPath, one consumer electronics customer cut a four-week automation project to three hours using coding agents, while a major chipmaker reduced a two-month build to a few days. On the earnings call, company executives described this as a potential ‘big unlock’ for enterprise adoption.
For the full year, UiPath guided revenue to $1.776 billion to $1.781 billion, with ARR expected to move above $2 billion.
“UiPath is no longer an RPA company. We are an RPA plus process orchestration plus solutions company,” says Malpani.
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