India represents one of the fastest-growing markets for UiPath, a global software company specialising in robotic process automation (RPA) software.

Interestingly, UiPath’s first customer was a business process transformation company based in India called Sutherland. 

“Daniel (co-founder at UiPath) personally used to fly to India to meet the customer, gather feedback, and integrate it into the platform. Many of the platform’s enhancements stemmed from feedback received from India,” Arun Balasubramanian, vice president & managing director, India & South Asia at Uipath, told AIM.

The company also established its first office outside of Bucharest, Romania, in India, preceding its presence in the US, where it is currently headquartered.

UiPath’s Growing Presence in India 

During his recent visit to India, Daniel Dines, co-founder and chief innovation officer at UiPath, said the company’s foundation is deeply rooted in India. 

“It’s no secret most of our developer’s community is in India, and we built this company with Indian talent, blood and effort,” he said while speaking at DevCon 2024.

Yet, even though the company has amassed over 10,000 customers globally, its customer base in India still falls behind that of other regions, such as the US.  Moreover, only around 13% of the company’s employees are based in India. 

Nonetheless, the company has ramped up efforts within the Indian market to address this disparity.

While the company is industry agnostic, some of the major uptakes the company has seen is in the financial, healthcare, manufacturing and public sector.

Some of the company’s top customers in India include Federal Bank, JSW, Max Healthcare, Omega Healthcare and ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India among others. 

“Federal Bank has utilised our solution to enhance compliance processes, particularly given the stringent demands from regulators like the RBI. They managed to reduce its regulatory response time to the RBI by over 50%,” Balasubramanian said.

Similarly, Omega Healthcare in India,  through their adept use of RPA technology, have substantially reduced the processing time and improved accuracy, ensuring timely and error-free invoice generation.

Even though the company has only recently worked with public sector customers in India, Balasubramanian believes they see great potential in terms of customer acquisition and revenue growth from the public sector.

Skilling Initiatives in India 

Another reason India is a prominent UiPath market is the country’s growing talent pool. 

It has R&D centres in Bengaluru, Seattle and Bucharest. Currently, 20% of UiPath’s research and development (R&D) happens in India, and going forward, the contribution will only increase, according to Balasubramanian.

Recently, Uipath pledged to equip 500,000 Indians with automation skills by 2027. “Over the last three years, we have been able to train 3,50,000 across 22 states in the country already,” Balasubramanian said.

For this, UiPath has partnered with nearly 1250 educational institutions in the country and has also renewed its partnership with FutureSkills Prime, a digital skilling initiative developed in strong partnership with the IT industry, academia, and government, funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and implemented by NASSCOM. 

Opportunities in AI 

At the recently held UiPath conference for developers in Bengaluru, Dines revealed that the company is building its own foundational models. 

Interestingly, Dines also pointed out that during the previous edition of the conference, the company released its vision models. 

“AI has consistently been integrated into our platform five years ago. Now, its significance has become even more pronounced because people recognise the broader possibilities enabled by AI.

“However, at the same time, they also understand that these achievements are unattainable without automation. Thus, automation serves as the pathway to realising the ultimate potential of AI,” Balasubramanian said.

Generative AI can help automate not just routine tasks but also highly complex tasks within an organisation. Hence, the company believes ​​automation platforms are the best way to deploy AI in an enterprise.

Over the years, UiPath has collaborated with OpenAI and announced many generative AI tools on its platform.

“I’ve seen enterprises struggling to find the right way to adopt AI, and this is where we play a good role. We aim to guide them in utilising data-driven automation to make informed decisions and leverage AI efficiently,” Gautam Goenka, vice president of software engineering at UiPath, told AIM.

“This involves starting from decision-making based on data and extending all the way to taking action. AI serves as the brain, requiring the right data to make decisions and automation to execute actions,” he added.